William S. Burroughs
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
— William S. Burroughs
In my writing I am acting as a mapmaker, 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
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
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, Chthonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excuses 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 constituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-tot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of forgone 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
I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute, & if they are cute they rapidly outgrow it
— William S. Burroughs
It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junk sick 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
Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.
— William S. Burroughs
Junk sickness is the reverse side of junk kick. The kick of junk is that you have to have it. Junkies run on junk time and junk metabolism. They are subject to junk climate. They are warmed and chilled by junk. The kick of junk is living under junk conditions. You cannot escape from junk sickness any more than you can escape from junk kick after a shot.
— William S. Burroughs
Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a painkiller. 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
Language is a virus from outer space
— William S. Burroughs
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