William S. Burroughs Ipsum

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war. the way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits. the only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do. your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative. your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer. love is a haunting melody that i have never mastered, and i fear i never will. thou shalt not be such a shit, you don't know you are one. it is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical i mean intended to produce very definite results. paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. art is not an end in itself, any more than einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. like all formulae, art was originally functional, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from einstein's formulae. 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. panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive. and built an act around it... it would get drunk, too, and have crying jags. nobody loved it. day and night. in the morning with transparentjelly... and the whole head... and there was no more feeling in them.

A functioning police state needs no police. anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means. nothing is true, everything is permitted. the way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits. whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction. to be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, i never had such a base. i never had a place i could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. ... am i alien? alien from what exactly? perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life... hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside. 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. like all pure creatures, cats are practical. we are all alone, born alone, die alone, and -- in spite of true romance magazines -- we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. i do not say lonely -- at least, not all the time -- but essentially, and finally, alone. this is what makes your self-respect so important, and i don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness that old feeling is still in my leaking heart. and it wanted to be kissed, in the morning with transparentjelly... that's the one thing so, the brain couldn't for a while, you could see... because the eyes went out....

A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering. the aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values. the face of evil is always the face of total need. i don't care if people hate my guts; i assume most of them do. the important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. the first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible 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. it's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy. in homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. in heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling. panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive. he thought this was cute at first but the asshole would eat its way through and it wanted to be kissed, finally, it talked all the time, around here anymore..