Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.
Life is a vacation from two eternities.
Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.
The word is now a virus.
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.
This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
Look at these poisonous color maps where flesh trees grow from human sacrifices; listen to these sniggering half-heard words of tenderness and doom from lips spotted with decay.
A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.
We should exterminate all rational thought.
Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.
My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don’t. I know that’s enigmatic, but that’s sort of a general formula for anyone, actually.
Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.
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.
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.
Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else’s ass.
Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation give evidence that we are not dealing with logic but with faith.
The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.
We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.
Time: a landing field! Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.
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.
There isn’t a feeling you can get on drugs that you can’t get without drugs.