William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs IIwas an American novelist, short story writer, satirist, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author who wrote in the paranoid fiction genre, and his influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth5 February 1914
CountryUnited States of America
I've seen villages in South America with no police whatever. Then the cops would arrive, then the sanitary inspectors, and before you know it they've got all the problems - crime, juvenile delinquency, the whole works - just like us.
He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.
Given certain known factors in an equation and the equation comprising a situation of absolute need - any form of need - you can predict the results. Leave a sick junkie in the back room of a drugstore and only one result is possible.
Addiction is a disease of exposure. Doctors and nurses, for instance, have a high addiction rate.
You see, should I stand in front of a landscape and paint it, I'm completely ignoring the factor of time. While I am painting it, it's changing, clouds are changing, all sorts of things. So there's the myth there of someone creating in a timeless vacuum.
There's no place for impractical dreamers around here.
Forward steps are made by giving up old armor because words are built into you - in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word-armor you carry; for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to.
Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.
Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
When you stop growing you start dying.
Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.
I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.