William S. Burroughs
You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk.Collection: Mean
If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no second chances in Mother Nature's Survival Course.Collection: Mother
Anslinger's reefer madness did not caution even the seeds of efficient, intelligent, ruthless action ... The same goes for Hoover, sniveling Nixon, the whole miserable, wretchedly evil lot of them ... not a man among them who could have pulled off a successful coup in a banana republic.Collection: Successful
Whatever happened to God's justice? I am convinced that God exist and God is one asshole.Collection: Justice
For years I wondered why dreams are so often dull when related, and this morning I find the answer, which is very simple - like most answers, you have always known it: No context ... like a stuffed animal set on the floor of a bank.Collection: Dream
No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.Collection: Spring
Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only thing about a writer is that he has written, and not his so-called life. 'And we (will) all die and the stars will go out, one after another.Collection: Stars
The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.Collection: Men
If all individuals were conditioned to machine efficiency in the performance of their duties there would have to be at least one person outside the machine to give the necessary orders; if the machine absorbed or eliminated all those outside the machine, the machine will slow down and stop forever.Collection: Order
As an old junk pusher told me, 'Watch whose money you pick up.'Collection: Junk
I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself.Collection: Writing
The Planet drifts to random insect doom.Collection: Apocalypse
Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.Collection: Men
My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.Collection: Past
All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of affect - emotion.Collection: Organization
I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question Why did you start using narcotics in the first place? should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.Collection: Addiction
And there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking themselves after the meal. Practical animals, they prefer to have others provide the food ... some of them do. There must have been a split between the cats who accepted domestication and those who did not.Collection: Cat
He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.Collection: Modern
I read Mailer's Ancient Evenings with great interest because I was interested in . . . the seven souls structure, which was very helpful to me in Western Lands. And also in Place of Dead Roads. So that's Mailer.Collection: Land
Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.Collection: Communication
The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.Collection: Self
Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image.Collection: Impact
Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.Collection: Yellow
I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.Collection: Family
If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.Collection: Numbers
We can translate word and letter into color - [Arthur] Rimbaud stated that in his color vowels, words quote "words" can be read in silent color.Collection: Color
Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? And here is my good big centipede! If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.Collection: Men
The most deadly picture is a picture of nothing at all. The colors are there, but there is no image, nothing.Collection: Color
The forward step must be made in silence. We detach ourselves from word forms - this can be accomplished by substituting for words, letters, concepts, verbal concepts, other modes of expressions: for example, color.Collection: Expression
There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.Collection: Photography
Shooting is my principal pastime.Collection: Shooting
Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.Collection: Writing
Tangier is one of the few places left in the world where, so long as you don't proceed to robbery, violence, or some form of crude, antisocial behavior, you can do exactly what you want.Collection: Long
Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.Collection: Feet
Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better.Collection: Assuming
Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.Collection: Love
I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.Collection: Thinking
Like Spain, I am bound to the past.Collection: Past
Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.Collection: Children
The idea was that we would decide the order when we looked at the proofs. I remember Brion Gysin saying "Well, why change it? It's perfect the way it is, the way it came from the printer." Made one major change, that is, the first chapter that came from the printers, which would be the beginning, we moved to the end. The first chapter became the last chapter. There's no actual cutups in Naked Lunch.Collection: Order
Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.Collection: Giving
I was thinking about New Mexico, and I rounded the corner in New York, and there was a New Mexico license plate: "New Mexico, land of enchantment."Collection: New York
We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.Collection: Mind
I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.Collection: Moving
His whole being radiates a pure, wild sweetness, flitting through night woods with little melodious cries, on some cryptic errand. There is also an aura of doom and sadness about this trusting little creature. He has been abandoned many times over the centuries, left to die in cold city alleys, in hot noon vacant lots, pottery shards, nettles, crumbled mud walls. Many times he has cried for help in vain.Collection: Wall
The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug.Collection: Thinking
Modern man has lost the option of silence.Collection: Men
When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.Collection: Lying