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William S. Burroughs
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William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a postmodern author who influenced underground and popular culture and literature. Much of Burroughs's work is experimental and features unreliable narrators. Also noted as semi-autobiographical, his work often drew from his experiences with drug addiction, and featured his various places of residence as settings in much of his work. With Brion Gysin, Burroughs popularized the cut-up, an aleatory literary technique. His writing also engaged frequent mystical, occult, or otherwise magical themes, constant preoccupations in his fiction and real life.
“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”
“This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.”
“America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.”
“Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.”
“The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners, and on the proposition that for social purposes, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable.”
“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”
Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.
