More Quotes by William S. Burroughs
There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?
The simplest questions are the most difficult.
Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.
To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.
Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, "I am not paid to listen to this drivel - you are a terminal fool!" Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.
Language is a virus from outer space.
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.
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.
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
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.
