William S. Burroughs: Trending quotes

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William S. Burroughs: 220 quotes24 likes

“Junk short-circuits sex. The drive to non-sexual sociability comes from the same place sex comes from, so when I have an H or M shooting habit I am non-sociable. If someone wants to talk, O. K. But there is no drive to get acquainted. When I come off the junk, I often run through a period of uncontrolled sociability and talk to anyone who will listen.”

William S. Burroughs book Junkie

Junkie (1953)

“I saw the Colonel empty his revolver and go down under ten wild boys. A moment later they tossed his bleeding head into the air and started a ball game. Just at dusk the wild boys got up and padded away. They left the bodies stripped to the skin many with genitals cut off. The wild boys make little testicles in which they carry their hasish and khat.”

William S. Burroughs book The Wild Boys

The Wild Boys (1971)

“Any imposition of government censorship on the media is a step in the direction of State control, a step which big money is most reluctant to take.”

William S. Burroughs book The Adding Machine: Collected Essays

"The Limits of Control"
The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (1985)

“The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners, and on the proposition that for social purposes, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable.”

William S. Burroughs

Source: Queer: A Novel (1985), Chapter One

“Every time I hit Panama, the place is exactly one month, two months, six months more nowhere, like the progress of a degenerative illness. A shift from arithmetic to geometric progressive seems to have occurred. Something ugly and ignoble and subhuman is cooking in this mongrel town of pimps and whores and recessive genes, this degraded leech on the Canal.”

William S. Burroughs

Two Years Later: Mexico City Return
Queer: A Novel (1985)

“In the fields workers are planting maize seeds under the direction of an overseer with staff and headdress. Close-up of a worker’s face. Whatever it is that makes a man a man, all feeling and all soul has gone out in that face. Nothing is left but body needs and body pleasures. I have seen faces like that in the back wards of state hospitals for the insane. Faces that live to eat, shit and masturbate.”

William S. Burroughs book The Wild Boys

The Wild Boys (1971)

“Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out.”

William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch

Hauser and O'Brien
Naked Lunch (1959)

“No job too dirty for a fucking scientist.”

William S. Burroughs book The Western Lands

Source: The Western Lands (1987), p. 8

“Peoples of the earth, you have all been poisoned.”

William S. Burroughs book Nova Express

Convert all available stocks of morphine to apomorphine. Chemists, work round the clock on variation and synthesis of the apomorphine formulae.
Nova Express (1968)