The world wasn’t a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.
The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.
Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.
Most people don’t see what’s going on around them. That’s my principal message to writers: ‘For God’s sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what’s going on around you.’
I see no reason why the artistic world can’t absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can’t we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?
Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.
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.
Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.
You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.
An addict never stops growing. Stupider.
I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.
If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness...
Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.
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.
Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.