William S. Burroughs Quotes

All political movements are basically anti-creative — since a political movement is a form of war. “There’s no place for impractical dreamers around here,” that’s what they always say. “Your writing activities will be directed, kindly stop horsing around.” “As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers.” Both favor alcohol and are against pot.

~ William S. Burroughs

The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a toilet wall closing on the Last Erection.

~ William S. Burroughs

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.

~ William S. Burroughs

Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.

~ William S. Burroughs

Abandon all nations, the planet drifts to random insect doom.

~ William S. Burroughs

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

~ William S. Burroughs

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

~ William S. Burroughs

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

~ William S. Burroughs

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

~ William S. Burroughs

Language is a virus from outer space.

~ William S. Burroughs

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

~ William S. Burroughs

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

~ William S. Burroughs

Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.

~ William S. Burroughs

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.

~ William S. Burroughs

You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.

~ William S. Burroughs

You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

~ William S. Burroughs

Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.

~ William S. Burroughs

No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.

~ 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

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

~ William S. Burroughs

The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.

~ William S. Burroughs

Thinking is not enough. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any... thing.

~ William S. Burroughs

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

~ William S. Burroughs

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

~ William S. Burroughs

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

~ William S. Burroughs