William S. Burroughs Quotes

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing.

There is a Senate and a Congress who carry on endless sessions discussing garbage disposal and outhouse inspection, the only two questions over which they have jurisdiction.

To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don't know we know.

Wouldn't it be great,as Scott Peck suggests, if all medical students had to undergo the symptoms and feeling of a spectrum of illnesses. From acute infections to terminal cancer - and Kuru, the laughi...

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because...

You're both mother fuckers. She was half asleep. Her voice was matter-of-fact as if referring to actual incest.

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear.

For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay the...

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

You know a real friend?Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.

We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems.

All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in...

Anything that can be accomplished chemically can be accomplished in other ways.

Hemingway said:'It don't come anymore.'So where did it go?

If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.

Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fing...