After the shot he collapsed on the bed and lay there inert, but something was stirring in his spine from neck to the tail – and now pieces tore loose in the eggs and then a red, glistening head emerges in reeking yellow slime – and then the whole centipede crawling out quick.

— William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs Quotes

Life is a vacation from two eternities.

— William S. Burroughs

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.

— William S. Burroughs

The word is now a virus.

— 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

This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games.

— William S. Burroughs

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.

— William S. Burroughs

A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.

— William S. Burroughs

We should exterminate all rational thought.

— William S. Burroughs

Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.

— William S. Burroughs

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.

— William S. Burroughs

Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.

— 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

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.

— William S. Burroughs

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.

— William S. Burroughs

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.

— William S. Burroughs

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.

— William S. Burroughs

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.

— William S. Burroughs

Time: a landing field! Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.

— 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

There isn’t a feeling you can get on drugs that you can’t get without drugs.

— William S. Burroughs
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