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Mainly drawn from "Conversations with William S Burroughs" edited by Allen Hibbard (University Press of Mississipi 1999).
"..I myself am in a very old tradition, namely, that of the picaresque novel. People complain that my novels have no plot. Well, a picaresque novel has no plot. It is simply a series of incidents. And that tradition dates back to the Satyricon...
....But remember that what we call the "novel" is a highly artificial form, which came in the nineteenth century. It's quite as arbitrary as the sonnet."
"I usually have at least three revisions, and for any novel I publish there will usually be three or four hundred pages that I don't use."
"You can select and edit, once you have made your cut-up. With the cut-up technique you get new sentences, passages, words, and meanings, some of which may be useful, and some not. There's no necessity of using it all."
"I find it impossible to do any writing while I'm teaching."
"People may think they can sit down and write a bestseller, but you can't do it. a bestseller is written up to the level of a man's ability. You can't write down to the reading public."
"There's two kinds of bestsellers. one is something that people know something about and want to know more about, like the Mafia, how a hotel works, and so forth.......And the other is the challenge posed by the menace, like Jaws.."
"I would say that the function of art or, in fact , of any creative thought is tomake people aware of what they know and don't know. For example, in the Middle Ages, the people living on the seacoast knew that the earth was round, but thye believed the earth was flat. It took Galileo to come and tell them what they knew already - that the earth was round."
"There's no contradiction to subverting something and profiting by it at the same time. I say, you gotta play the cards you got."
"The tendency of bureaucracies is to increase personnel, of course. If you've got one person who isn't doing anything, then he gets five or six subordinates in, and so it goes. They tend to make themselves necessary."
...with heavy weapons five percent can keep down 95 percent by just sheer force, if they have to. Of course no government has ever survived for any length of time anywhere by sheer force, because of the personnel that they would have to have constant surveillance, unless they used some form of psychological control like electric brain stimulation."
"The gun contol people attribute all the murders to the fact that people can get guns; but of course murderers can use other instruments. And then the riflemen scream that gun control is disarming the citizen, as if that were a factor anymore. Do they think they are back in the minutemen days, or that we need an army of citizens armed with sporting rifles? I think it's an irrelevant idea from both sides."
"Tell the truth once and for all and shut up for ever."
"That thing just reeked to high heaven."
"...women are trouble. It is another organism with interests perhaps basically irreconcilable with the male interests - which has installed itself as indispensible. Well they may be indispensible to some people, but they're not necessarily indispensible to me."
"I think what we call love is a fraud perpetrated by the female sex, and that the point of sexual relations between men is nothing that we would call love, but rather what we might call recognition."
"I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to the realisation of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing."
"Valerie Solanis - the woamn who shot Andy Warhol - "in her manifesto, gets around to the position that females are almost as bad as males. And that's much closer to my position, where it's all a bad idea. Male and female. You know, let's call the whole thing off."
"Certainly, the way in which AIDS is spread in this country suggests that it was done deliberately - but probably by us, not by Russia. After all, what's Russia going to gain by killing off gays and blacks and drug users? they wouldn't be hitting our military, our manpower, at all. On the other hand, the American government has very good reasons. They want scapegoats, for one thing. Diversions. They want a pretext for more governmental control. Addicts form a perfect conduit for introducing any biological or chemical agent.....
......Nothing would have been easier than to put a tiny, miniscule drop of infected blood in some of those needles and Whamo, in a couple of days you've got the virus spread all over New York."
I would love - to see something happen like that [the riots in France] in England. But it must happen after they get rid of the idea of this bloody Queen. As long as thay have any subservience to that image, it's hopeless. I think I can get 5,000 people in Trafalgar square saying "Bugger the Queen." That bitch. sitting there soaking up the energy of forty million people. People say, "The Queen isn't important. She's just a figurehead." a figurehead of subservience. a figurehead of kissing her ass. Worthless wench. She should be sweeping floors."
"Consider an apocalyptic statement: nothing is true everything is permitted. Hasaan I Sabah, the old man in the mountain. Not to be interpreted as an invitation to all manner of unrestrained and destructive behavior, that would be a minor episode, which would run its course. Everything is permitted because nothing is true. It is all make-believe . . . illusion . . . dream . . . art."