A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

— William S. Burroughs

A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out.

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair, and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

— William S. Burroughs

As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary

— William S. Burroughs

But you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude.

— William S. Burroughs

Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugly Spirit.

— William S. Burroughs

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.

— William S. Burroughs

... Communism, it's a reactive formation derived from capitalism. For this reason it's less flexible and has a lower survival potential. The days of laissez-faire capitalism are completely dead, and the assumptions of nineteenth-century Communism are equally dead, because they were based on laissez-faire capitalism. While there's hardly a trace of it left in capitalist countries, Communism is still reacting to something that's been dead for over a hundred years. And present-day Communism clings to this outmoded concepts, refusing to acknowledge the contradictions and failures of the Marxist system. Communism doesn't have any capacity to change. Capitalism is flexible, and it's changing all the time, and it's changed immeasurably. Communism apparently is still asserting that they are not changing, they're following the same Marxist principles. We don't have any principles. It's an advantage.

— William S. Burroughs