William S. Burroughs Ipsum

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer. desperation is the raw material of drastic change. only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. our national drug is alcohol. we tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror. in deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts. black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. casual curses are the most effective. a paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. there is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. it is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve. desperation is the raw material of drastic change. only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. love is a haunting melody that i have never mastered, and i fear i never will. the question is frequently asked: why does a man become a drug addict? the answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. you don't wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. it takes at least three months' shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. and you don't really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. it took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. i think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict. the questions, of course, could be asked: why did you ever try narcotics? why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? you become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. junk wins by default. i tried it as a matter of curiosity. i drifted along taking shots when i could score. i ended up hooked. most addicts i have talked to report a similar experience. they did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. they just drifted along until they got hooked. if you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict's special need. you don't decide to be an addict. one morning you wake up sick and you're an addict. (junky, prologue, p. xxxviii) smash the control images. smash the control machine. i miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. i don't mean sexually. i mean in connection with my writing. 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. i bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink... you know a real friend? someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone. hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside. whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. i cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive. i am not a person and i am not an animal. there is something i am here for something i must do before i can go. did i ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? his whole abdomen would move up and down, you dig, farting out the words. little raspy incurving hooks shouting out it wanted equal rights. it would get drunk, too, and have crying jags. and it wanted to be kissed, screaming at it to shut up... and the asshole said to him... in the end, not me... of the brain behind the eyes. the brain must have died....

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. i am not a person and i am not an animal. there is something i am here for something i must do before i can go. but the asshole would eat its way through.

Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm? if i had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes. never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. his word ain't worth a shit -- not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal. it's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy. as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape. that old feeling is still in my leaking heart. after that, he began waking up so, the brain couldn't it was trapped inside the skull... than a crab's eye at the end of a stalk..