William S. Burroughs Ipsum

The face of evil is always the face of total need. you can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal. which came first the intestine or the tapeworm? 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. love is a haunting melody that i have never mastered, and i fear i never will. in the u.s. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom. language is a virus from outer space. 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) there are no innocent bystanders... what are they doing there in the first place? writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. there are things i wish i could forget. the dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers 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... as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape. like all pure creatures, cats are practical. in the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. how i hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity. nothing is true, everything is permitted. that old feeling is still in my leaking heart. then it developed sort of teethlike... and it wanted to be kissed, same as any other mouth. i can talk and eat and shit." like burning gasoline jelly that the asshole couldn't do was see. for a while, you could see... of the brain behind the eyes. because the eyes went out....