William S. Burroughs Ipsum

Our national drug is alcohol. we tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror. 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. perhaps all pleasure is only relief. the only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do. which came first the intestine or the tapeworm? a paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. desperation is the raw material of drastic change. only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. 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. 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... and built an act around it... he would tear it off his mouth so, the brain couldn't of the brain behind the eyes. and then finally i know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. he is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune. if, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future. paranoia is just having the right information. squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. white smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. a group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. his flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony. happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war. take a shot in front of d.l. probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot... junkies have no shame... they are impervious to the repugnance of others. it is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido... the junky's shame disappears with his nonsexual sociability which is also dependent on libido... take care of my babies. take them with you wherever you go. after bill got his shot, a little color crept into his face and he would become almost coy. it was a gruesome sight. i remember once he told me how he'd been propositioned by a queer who offered him twenty dollars. bill declined, saying "i don't think you would be very well satisfied." bill twitched his fleshless hips. "you should see me in the nude," he said. "i'm really cute..

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'i want to see the manager.' a paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. if i had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes. 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 every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage. 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... open your mind and let the pictures out. that's the one thing and if you're doing a deal with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing. a writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. so lets dispense with this originality fetish... look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original. he asked if i wouldn't like to live completely without problems, say in greece maybe, nice climate, everything provided? i say: "when we find out what we are actually doing and who we actually are, that is the point of living...it may be only a few seconds...a few seconds of significant actions, out of a lifetime... people have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. the shadow of death is on every face. well as, one judge said to the other, 'be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' regret cannot observe customary obscenities. the purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest nova criminals. and there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking themselves after the meal. practical animals, they prefer to have others provide the food ... some of them do. there must have been a split between the cats who accepted domestication and those who did not..

Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means. hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside. if i had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes. 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. and built an act around it... finally, it talked all the time, like spain, i am bound to the past. a writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. so lets dispense with this originality fetish... look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original. if all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido. he is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells... they say only love can create, so who the fuck could love up a centipede? he's got more love in him than i got. there is a senate and a congress who carry on endless sessions discussing garbage disposal and outhouse inspection, the only two questions over which they have jurisdiction. america is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. the american non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. the dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers..