William S. Burroughs

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

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

Dream long enough and dream hard enough you will come to know dreaming can make it so.

danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal.

There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?

For years I wondered why dreams are so often dull when related, and this morning I find the answer, which is very simple - like most answers, you have always known it: No context ... like a stuffed animal set on the floor of a bank.

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.

Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit --- Kid, it was tasty.