Explore Quotes by William S. Burroughs

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time.

Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.

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

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.

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.

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.

Open your mind and let the pictures out

Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable.

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.

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

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.

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.

I wasn't exposed to art as I was growing up, and can't recall the first time I saw a work of art. However, I remember very clearly a vision I had of a little green reindeer when I was a child, and visions emanate from the same mythical area where painting resides. Whatever the reason, I immediately felt comfortable working with visual materials.

I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.

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?

No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.

Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: 'For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.'