William S. Burroughs Quotes page 2

“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”

Junkie (1953)

““Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.”

Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs (2000)

“There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing… I am a recording instrument… I do not presume to impose "story "plot" "continuity"… Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function… I am not an entertainer.”

Benway
Naked Lunch (1959)

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client”

Atrophied Preface
Naked Lunch (1959)

“Tea heads are gregarious, they are sensitive, and they are paranoiac. If you get to be known as a "drag" or a "bring down," you can't do business with them.”

Introduction
Naked Lunch (1959)

“As a young child Audrey Carsons wanted to be writers because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.”

Junkie (1953)

“Brainwashing, psychotropic drugs, lobotomy, and other more subtle form of psychosurgery; the technocratic control apparatus of the United States has at its fingertips new techniques if which fully exploited could make Orwell's 1984 seem like a benevolent utopia.”

"The Lemon Kid"
Exterminator! A Novel (1971)

William S. Burroughs book The Adding Machine: Collected Essays

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

“You see control can never be a means to any practical end. … Control can never be a means to anything but more control … like Junk.”

“Before my father started using morphine again he sent me to a Japanese person to learn something called Karate. I learn these things fast because I am blank inside, and I have no special way of moving or doing things so one way is the same to me as another. ‘”

Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone
Naked Lunch (1959)

“Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.”

The Wild Boys (1971)

“Tea heads are not like junkies. A junky hands you the money, takes his junk and cuts. But tea heads don't do things that way. They expect the peddler to light them up and sit around talking for half an hour to sell two dollars' worth of weed. If you come right to the point, they say you are a "bring down."”

Habit Notes continued
Naked Lunch (1959)

“A ghost in daylight on a crowded street.”

In fact, a peddler should not come right out and say he is a peddler.
Junkie (1953)

“Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? "And here is my good big centipede!" If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.”

Junkie (1953)

William S. Burroughs book The Western Lands

Source: The Western Lands (1987), ch. 4

“I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.”

“Lola's was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer-and-soda joint. There was a Coca-Cola box full of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube-metal stools covered in yellow glazed leather ran down one side of the room as far as the jukebox. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs and made horrible screeching noises when the maid pushed them around to sweep. There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither a past nor future in Lola's. The place was a waiting room, where certain people checked in a certain times.”

The Wild Boys (1971)

“The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell…. Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. 'The Human Virus can now be isolated and treated.”

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

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”

Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone
Naked Lunch (1959)

William S. Burroughs book The Western Lands

Source: The Western Lands (1987), ch. 5, as cited in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), pg. 234

“Peoples of the earth, you have all been poisoned.' Convert all available stocks of morphine to apomorphine. Chemists, work round the clock on variation and synthesis of the apomorphine formulae.”

William S. Burroughs book Nova Express

Nova Express (1968)

“At all levels the drug trade operates without without schedule. Nobody delivers on time except by accident. The addict runs on junk time. His body is his clock, and junk runs through it like an hour-glass. Time has meaning for him only with reference to his need. Then he make his abrupt intrusion into the time of others, and, like all Outsiders, all Petitioners, he must wait, unless he happens to mesh with non-junk time.”

“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.”

Hauser and O'Brien
Naked Lunch (1959)

“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.”

Junkie (1953)

“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.”

The Wild Boys (1971)

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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

The Wild Boys (1971)