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Other authors named William:
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Author's popularity: 3
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If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the icon to vote for, or the icon to vote against them.
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Popularity: 0
Vote: | A functioning police state needs no police. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo - and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question "Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?" should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Language is a virus from outer space. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Perhaps all pleasure is only relief. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | So 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The face of evil is always the face of total need. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, slumping ominously like the Dow Jones in 1929. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm? |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal. |
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Biography
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William Seward Burroughs (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, essayist, social critic and spoken word performer. Much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict. But he often distorts his experiences using surreal or graphic imagery, experimental structures, and a strong satirical voice.
His early writing is often associated with the Beat Generation. Burroughs was close friends with beat authors Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and Herbert Huncke, but Burroughs’ influence extends beyond this movement and even literature in general. His work has been influential to several subsequent counterculture literary, music and art movements.
Burroughs’s work has been quite controversial, especially during his lifetime. His most famous novel Naked Lunch was the subject of a landmark 1966 Massachusetts Supreme Court case that loosened obscenity laws to allow for artistic merit.
Burroughs produced a sizable amount of literature in over forty years of international publication. He was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983.
Early life William Seward Burroughs was born to a prominent family in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, also named William Seward Burroughs, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother, Laura Lee Burroughs, was the daughter of a distinguished minister whose family claimed to be descendants of Robert E. Lee. Her brother, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, is regarded as the father of modern public relations in the United States and worked before World War II as a representative for the Third Reich.
Burroughs was brought up in wealthy circumstances; his family had servants and gardeners. Burroughs’ parents ran an antique and gift shop, first in St. Louis, then in Palm Beach, Florida. They worked hard to maintain a respectable social status. In Burroughs' early fiction, such as Driving Lesson, he makes it clear he was unable, or unwilling, to follow the same path.
Burroughs may have been molested as a young child by a boyfriend of his English nanny and/or a female nurse. Late in his life he had flashback memories to events which may have been suppressed. Ted Morgan in his biography Literary Outlaw, as well as James Grauerholz, Burroughs' manager, editor and close friend, suggest this is possible.
Reportedly, Burroughs was a petty breaking and entering artist as an adolescent, raiding neighborhood homes to walk around, but not to steal possessions. He was inspired by the memoir You Can't Win, by Jack Black, a former thief and career criminal.
Burroughs attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis, and The Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, but was expelled from the latter because staff had found private journals concerning a budding erotic attachment to another boy. He would keep his sexual orientation concealed well into adulthood.
Burroughs graduated from Harvard University in 1936. He summarized his college experience in the prologue to Junkie, "I hated the University and I hated the town it was in. Everything about the place was dead. The University was a fake English setup taken over by the graduates of fake English public schools..."
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "William S. Burroughs".
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