Quotes from William S. Burroughs

Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.

This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games.

All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war.

The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses.

Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.

Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.

Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.

Modern man has lost the option of silence.

The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.

Perhaps all pleasure is relief.

A functioning police state needs no police.

An addict never stops growing. Stupider.

I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.

"My relationships with my cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance."

Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them, ' not by their disclaimers.

When you get to be my age there are more and more people you have known that you miss. Brion [Gysin], Antony Balch, Ian Summerville are ones I think of right away I was quite close to.

You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.

I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?

It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.

Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.

Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.

There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.

Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through. Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business.

Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.