110+ William S. Burroughs Quotes On Education, Slavery And Kurt Cobain

William S. Burroughs was an American writer and visual artist. He is best known for his experimental novels and his influence on the Beat Generation and the counterculture of the 1960s. His works explore a wide range of topics, including drug culture, the Beat Generation, sexuality, and the exploration of language and consciousness. Following is our collection on famous quotes by William S. Burroughs on education, life, slavery.

Top 10 William S. Burroughs Quotes

1. After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.
2. What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and sh*ts quantity.
3. Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
4. Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
5. The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.
6. Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
7. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing.
8. 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.
9. There are no innocent bystanders.
10. In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

William S. Burroughs Short Quotes

• A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
• Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
• A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.
• The face of evil is always the face of total need.
• There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?
• Paranoia is just having the right information.
• There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.
• Artists to my mind are the real architects of change.
• Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
• You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

William S. Burroughs Quotes About Life

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. — William S. Burroughs

Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse. — William S. Burroughs

in the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen — William S. Burroughs

If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise. — William S. Burroughs

Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death. — William S. Burroughs

The nonconformist here may be "beat down" by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind. — William S. Burroughs

Life is a vacation from two eternities. — William S. Burroughs

Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life. — William S. Burroughs

Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever? — William S. Burroughs

I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself. — William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs Quotes About Love

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. — William S. Burroughs

I bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink. — William S. Burroughs

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve. — William S. Burroughs

You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you. — William S. Burroughs

If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner. — William S. Burroughs

Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love. — William S. Burroughs

Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will. — William S. Burroughs

Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. — William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs Quotes About Dreams

America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers. — William S. Burroughs

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks. — William S. Burroughs

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. — William S. Burroughs

He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells. — William S. Burroughs

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits. — William S. Burroughs

Dream long enough and dream hard enough you will come to know dreaming can make it so. — William S. Burroughs

danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal. — William S. Burroughs

The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers — William S. Burroughs

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. — William S. Burroughs

In Mexico your wishes have a dream power. When you want to see someone, he turns up. — William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs Quotes About Experimental

Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo -- and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way. — William S. Burroughs

Well, "disgusting" doesn't refer to the books but to the subjective reaction of the person making the complaint. I don't think that anything is disgusting per se. These words "disgusting" and "filthy," etc., have prevented us from undertaking any scientific experimentation in sexual matters. — William S. Burroughs

Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo - and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way. — William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs Quotes About People

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military. — William S. Burroughs

The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It's as psychological as malaria. It's a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them. — William S. Burroughs

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. — William S. Burroughs

I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people. — William S. Burroughs

Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't. — William S. Burroughs

People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face. — William S. Burroughs

They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work. — William S. Burroughs

Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else's luck. The luck of most people is strictly non-transferrable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell. — William S. Burroughs

[Death is] a gimmick. It's the time-birth-death gimmick. Can't go on much longer, too many people are wising up. — William S. Burroughs

There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves. — William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs Quotes About Space

Language is a virus from outer space. — William S. Burroughs

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say I want to see the manager. — William S. Burroughs

Language is a virus from outer space — William S. Burroughs

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas. . . a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed. — William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs Quotes About Fact

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. — William S. Burroughs

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

A paranoid is someone who has all the facts. — William S. Burroughs

What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality. — William S. Burroughs

Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels. — William S. Burroughs

Revolution in America begins in books and music, then waits for political operatives to 'implement changes after the fact.' — William S. Burroughs

We must all face the fact that our leaders are certifiably insane or worse — William S. Burroughs

All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else? — William S. Burroughs

Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. "I don't have any whiskey," may be a fact but it is not a truth. — William S. Burroughs

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive. — William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs Quotes About Virus

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. — William S. Burroughs

The word is now a virus. — William S. Burroughs

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. — William S. Burroughs

Victimless crimes are the lifeline of the RIGHT virus. And there is a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties. — William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs Quotes About Writing

I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing. — William S. Burroughs

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 I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live. — William S. Burroughs

You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers. — William S. Burroughs

I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South. — William S. Burroughs

I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself. — William S. Burroughs

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. — William S. Burroughs

[Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me...he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on. — William S. Burroughs

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.' — William S. Burroughs

Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality. — William S. Burroughs

Always remember, there's no point trying to be faithful to the book because film and writing are just two completely different things. Any film stands on its own, apart from whether it's based on a novel. — William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — William S. Burroughs

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. — William S. Burroughs

The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots. I predict in the near future right-wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus. — William S. Burroughs

To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth. — William S. Burroughs

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination. — William S. Burroughs

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. — William S. Burroughs

I don't have any politics. I feel that as soon as politics arises, things are already in a hopeless state of deterioration. — William S. Burroughs

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

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention. — William S. Burroughs

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective. — William S. Burroughs

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. — 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. — William S. Burroughs

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction. — William S. Burroughs

The simplest questions are the most difficult. — William S. Burroughs

Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so-called Christians: The Inquisition, the Conquistadores, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day Bible Belt. — William S. Burroughs

The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility. — William S. Burroughs

If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes. — William S. Burroughs

I have no message to give the politicians of the world. They're all completely addicted to promiscuous verbalization and I'm quite sure they would not be at all interested in hearing about cut-ups and hieroglyphics and still less interested to hear about silence. — William S. Burroughs

The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. — William S. Burroughs

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. — William S. Burroughs

when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow. — William S. Burroughs

In exorcism, a verbal argument can never do anything. You can't ever beat the entity in a verbal argument because that's what he wants. It's only through a confront, a non-verbal confront, that anything happens. It has to be non-verbal. — William S. Burroughs

I'm an old-fashioned person, and I don't like informers. — William S. Burroughs

There isn't a feeling you can get on drugs that you can't get without drugs. — William S. Burroughs

Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey. — William S. Burroughs

Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them. — William S. Burroughs

The photo collage is a way to travel that must be used with skill and precision if we are to arrive... The collage as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition: A collage makes a statement. — William S. Burroughs

I feel that opiates - I include opium and all its derivatives, such as morphine, heroin, pantopon, etc. - are quite useless for any sort of creative work, useful though they may be for routine work. Much of the hard physical work in the Far East is done by opium addicts. — William S. Burroughs

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. — William S. Burroughs

Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning. — William S. Burroughs

Many doctors are drawn to this profession (psychology) because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data. — William S. Burroughs

A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product. — William S. Burroughs

When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man. — William S. Burroughs

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. — William S. Burroughs

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 laughing sickness. Just a month for each exposure, controlled of course, and a good heavy dose of excruciating pain. So they'll know what that feels like. — William S. Burroughs

A doctor is not criticized for describing the manifestations and symptoms of an illness, even though the symptoms may be disgusting. I feel that a writer has the right to the same freedom In fact, I think that the time has come for the line between literature and science, a purely arbitrary line, to be erased. — William S. Burroughs

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in. — William S. Burroughs

I'm definitely antiscientist because I feel that science represents a conspiracy to impose as the real and only universe, the universe of scientists themselves - they're reality-addicts, they've got to have things so real so they can get their hands on it. — William S. Burroughs

We should exterminate all rational thought. — William S. Burroughs

The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line. — William S. Burroughs

If a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his hrump fanny I believe is the word, gentlemen, heh heh for passive intercourse or (b) if he is a different type baboon more extrovert and well-adjusted, lead an attack on an even weaker baboon if he can find one. — William S. Burroughs

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. — William S. Burroughs

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time. — William S. Burroughs

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. — William S. Burroughs

Naked Lunch was from about a thousand pages of material. A lot of it overflowed, then, into the cut-up trilogy including Nova Express. — William S. Burroughs

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart. — William S. Burroughs

Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugly Spirit. — William S. Burroughs

Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination. — William S. Burroughs

All abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another. — William S. Burroughs

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting. — William S. Burroughs

Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand. — William S. Burroughs

A functioning police state needs no police. — William S. Burroughs

I detest limitations of any kind, and intend to establish my ass some place where I am a virgin on the police blotter. — William S. Burroughs

Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image. — William S. Burroughs

Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot... Junkies have no shame... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido... The junky's shame disappears with his nonsexual sociability which is also dependent on libido. — William S. Burroughs

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. — William S. Burroughs

Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function. — William S. Burroughs

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." — William S. Burroughs

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. — William S. Burroughs

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 there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change. — William S. Burroughs

Life Lessons by William S. Burroughs

1. William S. Burroughs taught us to embrace our individualism and to be true to ourselves, no matter what others may think.
2. He also encouraged us to take risks and to not be afraid of failure, as it can often lead to success.
3. Lastly, he taught us to be open to new experiences and to never be afraid to explore the unknown.