I have learned the cellular stoicism that junk teaches the user. I have seen a cell full of sick junkies silent and immobile in separate misery. They knew the pointlessness of complaining or moving. They knew that basically no one can help anyone else. There is no key, no secret someone else has that he can give you.

— William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs Quotes

I have learned the cellular stoicism that junk teaches the user. I have seen a cell full of sick junkies silent and immobile in separate misery. They knew the pointlessness of complaining or moving. They knew that basically no one can help anyone else. There is no key, no secret someone else has that he can give you.

— William S. Burroughs

It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido.

— William S. Burroughs

Or suppose you are a singer. Well splice your singing in with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals. Splice yourself in with newscasters, prime ministers, presidents. Why stop there? Why stop anywhere? Everybody splice himself in with everybody else.

— William S. Burroughs

These colorless sheets are what flesh is made from – Becomes flesh when it has color and writing – That is Word And Image write the message that is you on colorless sheets determine all flesh.

— William S. Burroughs

The figure had emerged from a lightless region where everything we have been taught, all the conventional feelings, do not apply.

— William S. Burroughs

The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.

— William S. Burroughs

Now my inspiration but it won’t last and we’ll be just a photograph – i.

— William S. Burroughs

You don’t sell a film by saying you won’t show it. There may be secrets too horrible for a man to know and keep his own sanity but that won’t go down in Hollywood, Mister.

— William S. Burroughs

The aim of education is the knowledge, not the facts, but of values.

— William S. Burroughs

If his charge connection is cut off cold, the Oblique Addict falls into such violent electric convulsions that his bones shake loose, and he dies with the skeleton straining to climb out of its unendurable flesh and run in a straight line to the nearest cemetery.

— William S. Burroughs

How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he ‘wants’?

— William S. Burroughs

I deplore brutality, he said, It’s not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt.

— William S. Burroughs

This cat book is an allegory, in which the writer’s past life is presented to him in a cat charade. Not that the cats are puppets. Far from it. They are living, breathing creatures, and when any other being is contacted, it is sad: because you see the limitations, the pain and fear and the final death. That is what contact means. That is what I see when I touch a cat and find that tears are flowing down my face.

— William S. Burroughs

Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.

— William S. Burroughs

A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

— William S. Burroughs

This planet is a penal colony and nobody is allowed to leave.

— William S. Burroughs

I could have been a successful bank robber, gangster, business executive, psychoanalyst, drug trafficker, explorer, bullfighter, but the conjecture of circumstances was never there. Over the years I begin to doubt if my time will ever come. It will come, or it will not come. There is no use trying to force it. Attempts to break through have led to curbs, near disasters, warnings. I cultivate an alert passivity, as though watching an opponent for the slightest sign of weakness.

— William S. Burroughs

Here we are in plague-stricken New York? Airborne AIDS, is it? And you figure to levitate your way out.

— William S. Burroughs

Chicago: invisible hierarchy of decorticated wops, smell of atrophied gangsters, earthbound ghost hits you at North and Halsted, Cicero, Lincoln Park, panhandler of dreams, past invading the present, rancid magic of slot machines and roadhouses.

— William S. Burroughs

Itinerant short con and carny hype men have burned down the croakers of Texas .

— William S. Burroughs
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