American writer (1914-1997)
My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
With William Burroughs: A Report From The Bunker
People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
The Western Lands
dream long enough and dream hard enough
you will come to know
dreaming can make it so
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
My Education: A Book of Dreams
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
Naked Lunch
Once a junky, always a junky. You can stop using junk, but you are never off after the first habit.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Junkie
A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what's going on.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Friend Magazine, 1970
My advice is to get a good agent and a good tax accountant if you ever make any money, and remember, you can't eat fame.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
"A Word to the Wise Guy", The Adding Machine: Collected Essays
Well as, one judge said to the other, "Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary."
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Naked Lunch
All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
"The War Universe"
Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Junkie
Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Ah Pook is Here! and Other Texts
Brainwashing, psychotropic drugs, lobotomy, and other more subtle form of psychosurgery; the technocratic control apparatus of the United States has at its fingertips new techniques if which fully exploited could make Orwell's 1984 seem like a benevolent utopia.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
"A Word to the Wise Guy", The Adding Machine: Collected Essays
Stupid people can learn a language quiet and easy because there is nothing going on in there to keep it out.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Queer: A Novel
I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose "story "plot" "continuity"... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Naked Lunch