“I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.” ― William S. Burroughs

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often and there's a reason for that... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.” ― William S. Burroughs

“In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.” ― William S. Burroughs

“The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict? The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict. The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii)” ― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.” ― William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays

“Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain't worth a shit -- not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.” ― William S. Burroughs

“There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?” ― William S. Burroughs, Exterminator!

“Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.” ― William S. Burroughs

“I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.” ― William S. Burroughs

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“The face of 'evil' is always the face of total need.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.” ― 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

“Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.” ― William S. Burroughs, Ghost of Chance

“I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.” ― William S. Burroughs

“we are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of true romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. i do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. this is what makes your self-respect so important, and i don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness” ― William S. Burroughs

“Thou shalt not be such a shit, you don't know you are one.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?

His whole abdomen would move up and down, you dig, farting out the words.

It was unlike anything I ever heard.

Bubbly, thick, stagnant sound.

A sound you could smell.

This man worked for the carnival,you dig?

And to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act.

After a while, the ass started talking on its own.

He would go in without anything prepared...

and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

Then it developed sort of teethlike...

little raspy incurving hooks and started eating.

He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it...

but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street...

shouting out it wanted equal rights.

It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags. Nobody loved it.

And it wanted to be kissed, same as any other mouth.

Finally, it talked all the time, day and night.

You could hear him for blocks, screaming at it to shut up...

beating at it with his fists...

and sticking candles up it, but...

nothing did any good, and the asshole said to him...

"It is you who will shut up in the end, not me...

"because we don't need you around here anymore.

I can talk and eat and shit."

After that, he began waking up in the morning with transparentjelly...

like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth.

He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands...

like burning gasoline jelly and grow there.

So, finally, his mouth sealed over...

and the whole head...

would have amputated spontaneously except for the eyes, you dig?

That's the one thing that the asshole couldn't do was see.

It needed the eyes.

Nerve connections were blocked...

and infiltrated and atrophied.

So, the brain couldn't give orders anymore.

It was trapped inside the skull...

sealed off.

For a while, you could see...

the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes.

And then finally the brain must have died...

because the eyes went out...

and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye at the end of a stalk.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.” ― William S. Burroughs

“To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life…” ― William S. Burroughs

“Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted” ― William S. Burroughs

“as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.” ― William S. Burroughs, My Education: A Book of Dreams

“How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.” ― William S. Burroughs

“It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.” ― William S. Burroughs

“As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.” ― William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays

“Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding. Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.” ― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary” ― William S. Burroughs

“How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.” ― William S. Burroughs

“when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Paranoia is just having the right information.” ― William S. Burroughs

“I began to get a feeling (...) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.” ― William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

“I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.” ― William S. Burroughs, The Wild Boys

“what a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish.” ― William S. Burroughs, My Education: A Book of Dreams

“Too perfect to be sexually attractive.” ― William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals

“And if you're doing a deal with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing.” ― William S. Burroughs

“If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Like Spain, I am bound to the past.” ― 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

“If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures, and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.” ― William S. Burroughs, Interzone

“A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.” ― William S. Burroughs, Ah Pook is Here! and Other Texts

“Cowboy: New York hood talk means kill the mother fucker wherever you find him. A rat is a rat is a rat is a rat. Is an informer.” ― 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. 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

“There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... 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

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.” ― William S. Burroughs, Queer

“You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.

(Interview, The Paris Review)” ― 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

“This book is dedicated to the Ancient Ones, to the Lord of Abominations, Humwawa, whose face is a mass of entrails, whose breath is the stench of dung and the perfume of death, Dark Angel of all that is excreted and sours, Lord of Decay, Lord of the Future, who rides on a whispering south wind, to Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and Plagues, Dark Angel of the Four Winds with rotting genitals from which he howls through sharpened teeth over stricken cities, to Kutulu, the Sleeping Serpent who cannot be summoned, to the Akhkharu, who such the blood of men since they desire to become men, to the Lalussu, who haunt the places of men, to Gelal and Lilit, who invade the beds of men and whose children are born in secret places, to Addu, raiser of storms who can fill the night sky with brightness, to Malah, Lord of Courage and Bravery, to Zahgurim, whose number is twenty-three and who kills in an unnatural fashion, to Zahrim, a warrior among warriors, to Itzamna, Spirit of Early Mists and Showers, to Ix Chel, the Spider-Web-that-Catches-the-Dew-of-Morning, to Zuhuy Kak, Virgin Fire, to Ah Dziz, the Master of Cold, to Kak U Pacat, who works in fire, to Ix Tab, Goddess of Ropes and Snares, patroness of those who hang themselves, to Schmuun, the Silent One, twin brother of Ix Tab, to Xolotl the Unformed, Lord of Rebirth, to Aguchi, Master of Ejaculations, to Osiris and Amen in phallic form, to Hex Chun Chan, the Dangerous One, to Ah Pook, the Destroyer, to the Great Old One and the Star Beast, to Pan, God of Panic, to the nameless gods of dispersal and emptiness, to Hassan i Sabbah, Master of Assassins.

To all the scribes and artists and practitioners of magic through whom these spirits have been manifested…. NOTHING IS TRUE. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.” ― William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night

“The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle...yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.” ― William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded

“In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One...” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. 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, Naked Lunch

“You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk..” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells...” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“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

“For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change.” ― William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

“Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love. ” ― William S. Burroughs

“The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.” ― William S. Burroughs

“A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.” ― 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

“Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.” ― 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, Naked Lunch

“O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time...” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“Many doctors are drawn to this profession (psychology) because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data.” ― William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands

“You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.” ― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable.” ― William S. Burroughs

“A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain - I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted simpering female impersonators I'd seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion. I would've destroyed myself. And a wise old queen - Bobo, we called her - taught me that I had a duty to live and bear my burden proudly for all to see. Poor Bobo came to a sticky end - he was riding in the Duke Devanche's Hispano Suissa when his falling hemorrhoids blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe skin upholstry. Even the eyes and the brain went with a horrible "shlupping" sound. The Duke says he would carry that ghastly "shlup" with him to his mausoleum.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency." - William S. Burroughs” ― William S. Burroughs

“All the role models are being exposed and this is good because role models are shit. The quicker we exposed them the better. The whole concept of role models is frightful! You gotta make your own role.” ― William S. Burroughs

“What's with the serum?" I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything...Turn a massacre into a sex orgy..." Or a joke." Precisely. Arty type...No principles...” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.” ― William S. Burroughs, With William Burroughs: A Report From The Bunker

“They say only love can create, so who the fuck could love up a centipede? He's got more love in him than I got. Now, killing a centipede makes me feel safer - like, one less.” ― William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals

“America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.” ― William S. Burroughs

“There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves.” ― William S. Burroughs, With William Burroughs: A Report From The Bunker

“God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire” ― William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads

“When you cut into the present, the future leaks out” ― William S. Burroughs

“Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.” ― William S. Burroughs

“The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.” ― William S. Burroughs

“America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians... the evil was there... waiting.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Sit down on your ass, or what's left of it after four years in the navy.” ― William S. Burroughs, Queer

“The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Death was in every sell of his body. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. Lee imagined he would glow in the dark.” ― William S. Burroughs, Queer

“Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else's luck. The luck of most people is strictly non-transferrable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell.” ― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot… Junkies have no shame… They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido… The junky’s shame disappears with his nonsexual sociability which is also dependent on libido…” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“all abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another. i could not have done what i have done as a writer had i been a gifted mathematician or physicist. honesty wrung out of him by pain, he cried out with a loud voice.” ― William S. Burroughs, My Education: A Book of Dreams

“I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.” ― William S. Burroughs

“If, after having been in someone's presence, you feel like you've lost a quart of plasma - avoid that presence. No one likes to hear the word "vampire" used around here... it's kind of bad for our public image.” ― William S. Burroughs

“He remembers his fathers last words: “Stay out of churches, son. All they got a key to is the shit house. And swear to me you’ll never wear a lawman’s badge.” ― William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads

“I do spend a great deal of time alone. I'm not very gregarious. I don't like parties and miscellaneous gatherings with no particular purpose. I think parties are largely a mistake. The bigger they are the more mistaken they are.” ― William S. Burroughs, With William Burroughs: A Report From The Bunker

“The simplest questions are the most difficult.” ― William S. Burroughs, With William Burroughs: A Report From The Bunker

“While in general I avoid the use of torture - torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance - the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved. To this end I devised several forms of disciplinary procedure. One was known as the Switchboard. Electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against the subject's teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard, to put certain connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights. Every time he makes a mistake the drills are turned on for twenty seconds. The signals are gradually speeded up beyond his reaction time. Half an hour on the Switchboard and the subject breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“For John Dillinger In hope he is still alive Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986 In hope he is still alive

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts; thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison; thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger; thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot; thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes; thanks for the American Dream to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through; thanks for the KKK; for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches; for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces; thanks for Kill a Queer for Christ stickers; thanks for laboratory AIDS; thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs; thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business; thanks for a nation of finks—yes,thanks for all the memories all right, lets see your arms; you always were a headache and you always were a bore; thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“But you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude.” ― William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

“I was lying there trying to control the fear. I did not know much about this uremic poisoning. A woman I'd known slightly in Texas had died of it after drinking a bottle of beer ever hour, night and day, for two weeks.” ― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Nobody's busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don't worry about what they're doing in South Korea and places like that. It's like the standard of living. Are you content to achieve your higher standard of living at the expense of people all over the world who've got a lower standard of living? Most Americans would say yes. Now we ask the question, are you content to enjoy your political freedom at the expense of people who are less free? I think they would also say yes.” ― William S. Burroughs, With William Burroughs: A Report From The Bunker

“Belief is a meaningless word. What does it mean? I believe something. Okay, now you have someone who is hearing voices and believes in these voices. It doesn't mean they have any necessary reality. Your whole concept of your "I" is an illusion. You have to give something called an "I" before you speak of what the "I" believes.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Like many people who have nothing to do, he was very resentful of any claims on his time.” ― William S. Burroughs, Queer

“Hemingway said: 'It don't come anymore.' So where did it go?” ― William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals “I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.” ― William S. Burroughs, Painting and Guns

“here lies a stupid son of a bitch who tried to make Death a company cop” ― William S. Burroughs

“If the soft machine works, don't fix it. If it works, don't fix it.” ― William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals

“My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.” ― William S. Burroughs

“The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“Shoot the bitch and write a book. That's what I did.” ― William S. Burroughs

“I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.” ― William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

“Oh be careful! There they go again!" said the old queen as his string broke spilling his balls over the floor.... "Stop them will you, James, you worthless old shit! Don't just stand there and let the master's balls roll into the coal-bin!” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“The name's Clem Williamson Snide. I am a private asshole.” ― William S. Burroughs

“In Mexico your wishes have a dream power. When you want to see someone, he turns up.” ― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands--the lymph glands that is, of course--when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonators I'd seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion--just a minute, Doctor Kildare, this isn't your script. I might well destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen--Bobo, we called her--who taught me that I had a duty to live and bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love.” ― William S. Burroughs, Queer

“Control never be a means to any practical end. It can never be a means to anything but more control… Like punk.” ― William S. Burroughs

“El comerciante de basura no vende su producto al consumidor, vende el consumidor a su producto. Él no mejora ni simplifica su mercancía. Degrada y simplifica al cliente.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“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, The Wild Boys

“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, Last Words: The Final Journals

“The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.” ― William S. Burroughs, Nova Express

“A John is different from a sucker. When you're with a sucker you're on alert all the time. You give him nothing. A sucker is just to be taken but a John is different. You give him what he pays for. When you're with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself too.” ― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“He kisses the D.S.'s hand thrusting his fingers into his mouth (the D.S. must feel his toothless gums) complaining he has lost teeth "inna thervith". "Please Boss Man. I'll wipe your ass, I'll wash out your dirty condoms, I'll polish your shoes with the oil on my nose....” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“Mohammed? Are you kidding? He was dreamed up by the Mecca Chamber of Commerce.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“Wouldn't you?” ― William S. Burroughs, The Yage Letters

“Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“...Communism, it's a reactive formation derived from capitalism. For this reason it's less flexible and has a lower survival potential. The days of laissez-faire capitalism are completely dead, and the assumptions of nineteenth-century Communism are equally dead, because they were based on laissez-faire capitalism. While there's hardly a trace of it left in capitalist countries, Communism is still reacting to something that's been dead for over a hundred years. And present-day Communism clings to this outmoded concepts, refusing to acknowledge the contradictions and failures of the Marxist system. Communism doesn't have any capacity to change. Capitalism is flexible, and it's changing all the time, and it's changed immeasurably. Communism apparently are still asserting that they are not changing, they're following the same Marxist principles. We don't have any principles. It's an advantage.” ― William S. Burroughs

“As I was walking past Tony Pastor's I saw Pat, the lesbian bouncer, throw a drunken young sailor out into the street. The sailor said, "That place is full of fucking queers." He swung at the air and nearly fell on his face, then he staggered away, muttering to himself.” ― William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

“If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.” ― William S. Burroughs, With William Burroughs: A Report From The Bunker

“The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time...” ― William S. Burroughs, The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs “Whatever happened to God's justice? I am convinced that God exist and God is one asshole.” ― William S. Burroughs, With William Burroughs: A Report From The Bunker

“So he is putting down junk and coming on with tea. I take three drags, Jane looked at him and her flesh crystallized. I leaped up screaming "I got the fear!" and ran out of the house. Drank a beer in a little restaurant - mosaic bar and soccer scores and bullfight posters - and waited for the bus to town.

A year later in Tangier I heard she was dead.” ― William S. Burroughs

“The boys eat happily looking into each other’s eyes. Blood runs down their chins.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“I got the fear!” ― William S. Burroughs

“Most people don't notice what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: for God's sake, keep your eyes open.” ― William S. Burroughs, With William Burroughs: A Report From The Bunker

“After Bill got his shot, a little color crept into his face and he would become almost coy. It was a gruesome sight. I remember once he told me how he'd been propositioned by a queer who offered him twenty dollars. Bill declined, saying "I don't think you would be very well satisfied." Bill twitched his fleshless hips. "You should see me in the nude," he said. "I'm really cute.” ― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“A doctor is not criticized for describing the manifestations and symptoms of an illness, even though the symptoms may be disgusting. I feel that a writer has the right to the same freedom In fact, I think that the time has come for the line between literature and science, a purely arbitrary line, to be erased.” ― William S. Burroughs, The Letters of William S. Burroughs: Volume II

“Hip - Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands "jive talk." Someone who is "with it." The expression is not subject to definition because, if you don't "dig" what it means, no one can ever tell you.” ― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“We will endeavor to halt the Industrial Revolution before it is too late, to regulate population at a reasonable point, to eventually replace quantitative money with qualitative money, to decentralize, to conserve resources. The Industrial Revolution is primarily a virus revolution, dedicated to controlled proliferation of identical objects and persons. You are making soap, you don't give a shit who buys your soap, the more the soapier. And you don't give a shit who makes it, who works in your factories. Just so they make soap.” ― William S. Burroughs

“There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no solution. Just conflict. Only thing that can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner, and Calico. Pure love. What I feel for my cats past and present.” ― William S. Burroughs

“I don't know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don't even have a word for love—that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept. As to what falling in love means, I'm uncertain. Love, well, it means simply physical attraction and liking a person at the same time.” ― William S. Burroughs, With William Burroughs: A Report From The Bunker

“The beautiful disease and The government falls along the weed rooms flesh along the weed government . . .” ― William S. Burroughs

“I'm an old-fashioned person, and I don't like informers.” ― William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals

“I had the feeling that all over America such stupid arguments were taking place on street corners and in bars and restaurants. All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say "I don't take any shit!" and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him.” ― William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

“Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, “I am not paid to listen to this drivel — you are a terminal fool!” Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen.” ― William S. Burroughs

“A coprophage calls for a plate, shits on it and eats the shit, exclaiming, "Mmmm, that's my rich substance.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“If a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his hrump fanny I believe is the word, gentlemen, heh heh for passive intercourse or (b) if he is a different type baboon more extrovert and well-adjusted, lead an attack on an even weaker baboon if he can find one.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“According to the legend an evil old doctor, who called himself God and us dogs, created the first boy in his adolescent image. The boy peopled the garden with male phantoms that rose from his ejaculations. This angered God, who was getting on in years. He decided it endangered his position as CREATOR. So he crept upon the boy and anaesthetized him and made Eve from his rib. Henceforth all creation of beings would process through female channels. But some of Adam's phantoms refused to let God near them under any pretext.” ― William S. Burroughs, Port of Saints

“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

“We’re not fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings hanging off it like Mafioso spaghetti. We want the whole tamale. The Johnsons are taking over the Western Lands. We built it with our brains and our hands. We paid for it with our blood and our lives. It’s ours and we’re going to take it. And we are not applying in triplicate to the Immortality Control Board. Anybody gets in our way we will get our communal back against a rock or a tree and fight the way a raccoon will fight a fucking dog.” ― William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads

“The program of the ruling elite in Orwell's 1984 was: "A foot stamping on a human face forever!" This is naive and optimistic. No species could survive for even a generation under such program. This is not a program of eternal, or even long-range dominance. It is clearly an extermination program.” ― William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands

“Anslinger's reefer madness did not caution even the seeds of efficient, intelligent, ruthless action ... The same goes for Hoover, sniveling Nixon, the whole miserable, wretchedly evil lot of them . . . not a man among them who could have pulled off a successful coup in a banana republic.” ― William S. Burroughs

“Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.” ― William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night

“Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.” ― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hours in the precinct jail. It was a clear bright day, but there was warmth in the sun. Danny shivered with an inner cold. He turned up the collar of his worn, greasy black overcoat. This beat benny wouldn't pawn for a deuce, he thought.” ― William S. Burroughs, Interzone

“Doctor Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: "Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often and there's a reason for that ... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning. Just as a bull fighter with his skill and knowledge extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked, so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celerity, rescues him from death at the last possible split second ... "Did any of you ever see Doctor Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: `I don't give them time to die,' he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. `Fucking undisciplined cells!' he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“There's a boy across the river with an ass like a peach; alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“How many years threaded on a needle of blood? Hands slack on lap he sits looking out at the winter dawn with the cancelled eyes of junk.” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems.” ― 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, Ah Pook is Here! and Other Texts

“putting on a "b" production for a fruit” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down his ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs.” ― William S. Burroughs, Queer