William S. Burroughs

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1 William Seward Burroughs
2 Sourced

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William Seward Burroughs

(February 5, 1914 - August 2, 1997) American author, "Intergalactic Space/Time Liberator"

"Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside..."

"Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece."

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted."
- (also attributed to Hassan i Sabah)

" 'treatment is symptomatic' - which means in the trade there is none. "

"The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a seperate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle...yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to acheive even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word." (The Ticket That Exploded)

"Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it." (The Ticket That Exploded)

"Now the perpetrating of miracles constitutes a brazen attempt to loosen up the universe. When you set up something as MIRACLE, you deny the very concept of FACT, establish a shadowy and spurious court infested by every variety of coyote and shady fixer beyond Court of Fact.

(To his secretary after a visit from Kurt Cobain) "There's something wrong with that boy, he frowns for no reason."

"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers."

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

"I'm running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money."

"Word is a virus."

"Language is a virus."
- Variant: "Language is a virus from outer space."
- Variant: "Language is obviously a virus as it depends on replication."
- Used as a song title by Laurie Anderson.

"Madness is confusion of levels of fact...Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels."

"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."

"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."

Jack Kerouac, on editing Naked Lunch (in disgust): "Bill, what is all this stuff about young naked boys being hanged in limestone caves?"
Burroughs: "No idea. I know I'm some kind of interplanetary agent but I don't think my signals are decoding properly."

"Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation'. Creative viewing."

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

"The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client."

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

"There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination."

"When I become death, death is the seed from which I grow."

"Words, colors, light, sound, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! ... Steal anything in sight...."

"General procedure: Read and learn all you can about problem. Look at problem from a point of zero preconception. Devise variations and alternative solutions. Check back to see if your solution has workable advantage over solutions previously arrived at . . . 'To carry the method a step further than solution of purely technical problem where purpose is implicit in the artifact: devising more efficient gun, tool, boat, signal system, medical or interrogation procedure."

"I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness. . . When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group. . . . There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence..."

"I think all novelists particularly are engaged in the creation of Tulpas. That is exactly what they are doing. Ahh... they are trying to create characters that have an existence apart from the novel, apart from the page."

"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 mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right."

"Survive, it's the name of the game. Would I give a shit about these people?"

"No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death."

"Shoot the bitch and write a book. That's what I did."

"Love! What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE"

"Son, never listen to a priest or a policeman...the only thing they have is the key to the shithouse"

"No job too dirty for the fucking scientists."

"If you're doing business with a religious son-of-a-bitch, get it in writing. His word isn't worth shit. Not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal"

"Images. Millions of images. That's what I eat."

"Thou shalt not blow pot-smoke into the face of my pet. Say's whom who want's to get high."

"Thou shalt not be such a shit, you don't know you are one."

"Thou shalt not drop an atom bomb or even shit one out in the first place- I'm talking to you, Robert Oppenheimer."

"A functioning police state needs no police."

"Heroin is a vitamin...don't let anyone tell you different heroin IS a vitamin...there's nothing in the game plan...that says that all vitamins have to be good for you..."

"A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what’s going on."

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

“The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls, Top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren, the Secret Name. This corresponds to my Director, He directs the film of your life from conception to death. The Secret Name is the title of your film. When you die, that's where Ren came in. Second soul, and second one off the sinking ship, is Sekem: Energy, Power, Light The Director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons. Number three is Khu, the Guardian Angel. He, she, or it is third man out . . . depicted as flying away across a full moon, a bird with luminous wings and head of light. Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defense- but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go beck to Heaven for another vessel.

“The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead. Number four is Ba, the heart, often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba. Number five is Ka, the Double, most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the western Lands. Number six is Khaibit, the Shadow, Memory, your whole past conditioning from this and other lives. Number seven is Sekhu, the Remains. I first encountered this concept in Norman Mailer's, Ancient Evenings, and saw that it corresponded precisely with my own mythology, developed over a period of many years, since birth in fact. Ren, the Director, the Secret Name, is your life story, your destiny-in one word or one sentence, what was your life about? Nixon: Watergate. Billy the Kid: Quien es? And what is the Ren of the Director? Actors frantically packing in thousands of furnished rooms and theatrical hotels: "Don't bother with all that junk, John. The Director is on stage! And you know what that means in show biz: every man for himself." Sekem corresponds to my Technician: Lights. Action. Camera. ' "Look, boss, we don't got enough Sek to fry an elderly woman in a fleabag hotel fire. And you want a hurricane?" "Well, Joe, we'll just have to start faking it" "Fucking moguls don't even know what buttons to push or what happens when you push them. Sure; start faking it and leave the details to Joe." Look, from a real disaster you get a pig of Sek: sacrifice, tears, heartbreak, heroism and violent death. Always remember, one case of VD yields more Sek than a cancer ward. And you get the lowest acts of which humans are capable-remember the Italian steward who put on women's clothes and so filched a seat in a lifeboat? "A cur in human shape, certainly he was born and saved to set a new standard by which to judge infamy and shame." With a Sek surplus you can underwrite the next one, but if the first one's a fake you can't underwrite a shithouse. Sekem is second man out: 'No power left in this set" He drinks a bicarbonate of soda and disappears in a belch. Lots of people don't have a Khu these days. No Khu would work for them. Mafioso Don: "Get offa me, Khu crumb! Worka for a living!" Ba, the Heart: that's sex. Always treacherous. Suck all the Sek out of a man. Many Bas, have poison juices. The Ka is about the only soul a man can trust. If you don't make it, he don't make it. But it is very difficult to contact your real Ka. Sekhu is the physical body, and the planet is mostly populated with walking Sekhus, just enough Sek to keep them moving. The Venusian invasion is a takeover of the souls. Ren is degraded by Hollywood down to John Wayne levels. Sekem works for the Company. The Khus are all transparent fakes. The Bas is rotten with AIDS. The Ka is paralyzed. Khaibit sits on yon like a nagging wife. Sekhu is poisoned with radiation and contaminants and cancer. There is intrigue among the souls, and treachery. No worse fate can befall a man than to be surrounded by traitor souls. And what about Mr. Eight-Ball, who has these souls? They don't exist without him, and he gets the dirty end of every stick. Eights of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your dirty rotten vampires: A hundred years ago there were rat-killing .dogs known as "Fancies." A man bet on his "Fancy," how many rata he would kill. The rats were confined in a circular arena too high for a rat to jump over. But they formed pyramids, so that the top rats could escape. Sekhu is bottom rat in the pyramid. Like the vital bottom integer in a serial, when that goes, the whole serial universe gone up in smoke. It never existed. Angelic boys who walk on water, sweet inhuman voices from a distant star. The Khu, sweet -bird of night, with luminous wings and a head of light, flies across the full moon . . . a born-again redneck raise's his shotgun. . . . "Stinkin' Khu!" The Egyptians recognized many degrees of immortality. The Ren and the Sekem and the Khu are relatively immortal, but still subject to injury. The other souls who survive physical death are much more precariously situated. Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If humans and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields could be totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The mummy's 'nightmare: disintegration of souls, and this is precisely the ultrasecret and supersensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut.”

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Cities of the Red Night (1981)

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Wikipedia has an article about:
Cities of the Red Night.

Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.

There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.

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The Western Lands (1987)

Remember the Italian steward who put on women's clothes and so filched a seat in a lifeboat? "A cur in human shape, certainly he was born and saved to set a new standard by which to judge infamy and shame."
- Page 6.
"Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."

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