A biography for William S. Burroughshasn’t been written yet.
“Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.”
“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.”
“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.”
“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”
“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.”
“In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.”
“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”
“Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.”
“After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'”
“Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.”
“It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.”
“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.”
“I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?”
“That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.”
“Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.”
“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.”
“Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.”
“The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.”
“I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.”
“Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.”