Quotes By William S. Burroughs

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

Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?

I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.

Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.

You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.

The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.

A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.

The face of evil is always the face of total need.

Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.

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

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

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

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

Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.

Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.

The aim of education is the knowledge not of facts but of values.

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'

Language is a virus from outer space.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.