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. a paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. 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. smash the control images. smash the control machine. which came first the intestine or the tapeworm? your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative. love is a haunting melody that i have never mastered, and i fear i never will. 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. like all pure creatures, cats are practical. that old feeling is still in my leaking heart. day and night. all over his mouth. and grow there. so, finally, his mouth sealed over... sealed off. and then finally and there was no more feeling in them how long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? you have to live in hell to see heaven. happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war. wouldn't it be great,as scott peck suggests, if all medical students had to undergo the symptoms and feeling of a spectrum of illnesses. from acute infections to terminal cancer - and kuru, the laughing sickness. just a month for each exposure, controlled of course, and a good heavy dose of excruciating pain. so they'll know what that feels like. all abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another. i could not have done what i have done as a writer had i been a gifted mathematician or physicist. well as, one judge said to the other, 'be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' regret cannot observe customary obscenities. to all the scribes and artists and practitioners of magic through whom these spirits have been manifested... nothing is true. everything is permitted. if you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. if we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the addict in the street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. the addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. when there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. as long as junk need exists, someone will service it. a john is different from a sucker. when you're with a sucker you're on alert all the time. you give him nothing. a sucker is just to be taken but a john is different. you give him what he pays for. when you're with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself too. while in general i avoid the use of torture - torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance - the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. and torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved. to this end i devised several forms of disciplinary procedure. one was known as the switchboard. electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against the subject's teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard, to put certain connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights. every time he makes a mistake the drills are turned on for twenty seconds. the signals are gradually speeded up beyond his reaction time. half an hour on the switchboard and the subject breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine. if a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his hrump fanny i believe is the word, gentlemen, heh heh for passive intercourse or (b) if he is a different type baboon more extrovert and well-adjusted, lead an attack on an even weaker baboon if he can find one..

Perhaps all pleasure is only relief. 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. nothing exists until or unless it is observed. an artist is making something exist by observing it. and his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. i call it 'creative observation.' creative viewing. thou shalt not be such a shit, you don't know you are one. 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. the dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape. it was unlike anything i ever heard. bubbly, thick, stagnant sound. a sound you could smell. this man worked for the carnival, you dig? little raspy incurving hooks same as any other mouth. beating at it with his fists... except for the eyes, you dig? what a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish. dream long enough and dream hard enough you will come to know dreaming can make it so... the cat does not offer services. the cat offers itself. you know, they ask me if i were on a desert island and i knew nobody would ever see what i wrote, would i go on writing. my answer is most emphatically yes. i would go on writing for company. because i'm creating an imaginary -- it's always imaginary -- world in which i would like to live. fear of death is form of stasis horrors. the dead weight of time. cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the muse. it cannot be done. you can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal. everything jack says is to be taken with considerable reserve. like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't. intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. if any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination. if, after having been in someone's presence, you feel like you've lost a quart of plasma - avoid that presence. no one likes to hear the word "vampire" used around here... it's kind of bad for our public image. i prefer cats to people, for the most part. most people aren't cute, and if they are cute they rapidly outgrow it. after the shot he collapsed on the bed and lay there inert, but something was stirring in his spine from neck to the tail - and now pieces tore loose in the eggs and then a red, glistening head emerges in reeking yellow slime - and then the whole centipede crawling out quick. he kisses the d.s.'s hand thrusting his fingers into his mouth (the d.s. must feel his toothless gums) complaining he has lost teeth "inna thervith". "please boss man. i'll wipe your ass, i'll wash out your dirty condoms, i'll polish your shoes with the oil on my nose.... if a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his hrump fanny i believe is the word, gentlemen, heh heh for passive intercourse or (b) if he is a different type baboon more extrovert and well-adjusted, lead an attack on an even weaker baboon if he can find one. my characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why i'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. i have plenty of company..

A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering. 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. knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born. in the end, not me... after that, he began waking up what a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish. god save the queen and a fascist regime ... a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which limey-land is built. the queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. the english have gone soft in the outhouse. england is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire in deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. it is as final as the mountains: a fact. there it is. when you realize it you cannot complain. intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. if any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination. a john is different from a sucker. when you're with a sucker you're on alert all the time. you give him nothing. a sucker is just to be taken but a john is different. you give him what he pays for. when you're with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself too..