William S. Burroughs Ipsum

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage. i am getting so far out one day i won't come back at all. if i had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes. love? what is it? most natural painkiller what there is. 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) 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. and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. after a while, the ass started talking on its own. he would go in without anything prepared... and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. in the morning with transparentjelly... would have amputated spontaneously that's the one thing.

A functioning police state needs no police. 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. and built an act around it... like burning gasoline jelly.

Our national drug is alcohol. we tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror. admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. in fact, both homo - and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way. nothing is true, everything is permitted. there couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. they'd be dead in two weeks. i am getting so far out one day i won't come back at all. the best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility. a cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering. 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. and there was no more feeling in them.