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
[Political movements] both favor alcohol and are against pot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most all methods of capitol punishment are designed to inflict the maximum of humiliation - not attempts to prevent suicide.
We can translate word and letter into color - [Arthur] Rimbaud stated that in his color vowels, words quote "words" can be read in silent color.
The simplest questions are the most difficult.
A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
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.
If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.