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Quotes by William S. Burroughs

A functioning police state needs no police.
– William S. Burroughs
A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
– 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
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
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
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
Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
– William S. Burroughs
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
– William S. Burroughs
Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
– William S. Burroughs
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
– William S. Burroughs
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.
– William S. Burroughs
Language is a virus from outer space.
– William S. Burroughs
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.
– William S. Burroughs
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
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it creative observation. Creative viewing.
– William S. Burroughs
Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror.
– William S. Burroughs
Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
– William S. Burroughs
The face of evil is always the face of total need.
– 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
There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, slumping ominously like the Dow Jones in 1929.
– 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
Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
– William S. Burroughs
You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
– 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
Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
– William S. Burroughs
Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
– 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
Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.
– William S. Burroughs
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
– William S. Burroughs
Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
– William S. Burroughs