More Quotes by William S. Burroughs
If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.
After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know... Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough... So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness.
I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.
The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.
what a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish.
