William S. Burroughs

“We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place.”

“Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.”

“The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.”

“Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.”

“An addict never stops growing. Stupider.”

“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.”

“We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems.”

“You know a real friend?Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.”

“Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.”

“Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?”

“Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.”

“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.”

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

“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.)”

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

“Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference.”

“The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it.”

“when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.”

“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.”

“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.”