William S. Burroughs
The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.Collection: Love
I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute at all, and if they are cute they very rapidly outgrow it.Collection: Cute
Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.Collection: Realization
You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you.Collection: Pain
There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.Collection: Real
Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.Collection: Memories
There isn't a feeling you can get on drugs that you can't get without drugs.Collection: Addiction
If after having been exposed to someone's presence you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.Collection: Needs
He who has learned to do nothing with his whole mind and body will have everything done for him.Collection: Mind
as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.Collection: Prison
Too perfect to be sexually attractive.Collection: Perfect
I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.Collection: Fear
I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.Collection: Animal
If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.Collection: Good Night
How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.Collection: Men
When you stop growing you start dying.Collection: Dying
The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possibleCollection: Art
The simplest questions are the most difficult.Collection: Discovery
NOTHING happens by coincidence.Collection: Coincidence
what a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish.Collection: Spiritual
There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?Collection: Bystanders
Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, "I am not paid to listen to this drivel - you are a terminal fool!" Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.Collection: Crazy
in the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happenCollection: Magic
Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation.Collection: Political
If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.Collection: Live Life
Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.Collection: Fiction
I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.Collection: Positive
I don't know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don't even have a word for love-that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept. As to what falling in love means, I'm uncertain. Love, well, it means simply physical attraction and liking a person at the same time.Collection: Christian
One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know... Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough... So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness.Collection: Art
If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.Collection: Political Revolution
The beautiful disease and The government falls along the weed rooms flesh along the weed government.Collection: Beautiful
Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face.Collection: Rocks
I like the idea of generalizing the narcotic thing by making it black meat addiction.Collection: Ideas
A John is different from a sucker. When you're with a sucker you're on alert all the time. You give him nothing. A sucker is just to be taken but a John is different. You give him what he pays for. When you're with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself too.Collection: Taken
I think Judge Learned Hand was a cultured, intelligent man.Collection: Intelligent
Exorcism is a subject that interests me, and books on shamanism, I've read through.Collection: Book
Everything Jack says is to be taken with considerable reserve.Collection: Taken
I think if a writer is not endeavoring to expand and alter consciousness in himself and in his readers, he is not doing much of anything. It is precisely words, word lines, lines of words and images, and associations connected with these word and image lines in the brain, that keep you in present time, right where you are sitting now.Collection: Thinking
Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.Collection: Generations
I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South.Collection: Writing
I don't go into hysterics or anything, but I look around for something to smash it with. I used to live out in the country when I first moved here, and there were a lot of centipedes in the house, and I set out to kill them all. A program of genocide. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, and I'd know there's a centipede in this room. And there always was. And I couldn't go to sleep until I killed it.Collection: Country
The Nova Mob doesn't have motives, as we understand motives. "Sex is profoundly distasteful to a being of my mineral origin," as a leader of the Nova Mob, Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin, said on one occasion.Collection: Sex
I meant that people will take anything that gives them a lift, whether it's alcohol or cocaine or the consciousness-expanding drugs or opiates. In Iran, until recently, they sold opium in shops legally, and they had 3,000,000 addicts in a population of 15,000,000. I don't believe that all those people were escaping from "complexes" or anything of the sort. They were simply exposed to it.Collection: Believe
Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.Collection: Practice
Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill!Collection: Book
I knew [Timothy] Leary, but barely knew, didn't really know Jan [Kerouac].Collection: Knows
We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness.Collection: World
It's a tract against capital punishment in the genre of Swift's Modest Proposal. I was simply following a formula to its logical conclusion. Some people appear to have understood it. The publication of Naked Lunch in England practically coincided with their abolition of capital punishment. The book obviously had a certain effect.Collection: Book
Death was in every sell of his body. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. Lee imagined he would glow in the dark.Collection: Dark