William S. Burroughs Ipsum

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'i want to see the manager.' most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has. there is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. it is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve. you were not there for the beginning. you will not be there for the end. your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative in the u.s. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom. there are no innocent bystanders... what are they doing there in the first place? cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the muse. as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape. "because we don't need you like a tadpole's tail and if you're doing a deal with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing. you need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere. nobody's busting into your apartment at three in the morning, are they? well, then don't worry about what they're doing in south korea and places like that. it's like the standard of living. are you content to achieve your higher standard of living at the expense of people all over the world who've got a lower standard of living? most americans would say yes. now we ask the question, are you content to enjoy your political freedom at the expense of people who are less free? i think they would also say yes. the self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines. we will endeavor to halt the industrial revolution before it is too late, to regulate population at a reasonable point, to eventually replace quantitative money with qualitative money, to decentralize, to conserve resources. the industrial revolution is primarily a virus revolution, dedicated to controlled proliferation of identical objects and persons. you are making soap, you don't give a shit who buys your soap, the more the soapier. and you don't give a shit who makes it, who works in your factories. just so they make soap..

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. 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. perhaps all pleasure is only relief. silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing. artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. i am getting so far out one day i won't come back at all. nobody loved it. screaming at it to shut up... and grow there. and the whole head... give orders anymore. and then finally and there was no more feeling in them when i become death. death is the seed from which i grow. how long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? you have to live in hell to see heaven. the cat does not offer services. the cat offers itself. 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. or a joke." i had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as i turned my head, so that i never quite saw it. 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. for the last four years of her life, mother was in a nursing home called chateins in st. louis ... [s]ix months before she died i sent a mother's day card. there was a horrible, mushy poem in it. i remember feeling "vaguely guilty. 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. 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..

Nothing is true, everything is permitted. sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts. in my writing i am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and i see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed. the only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do. which came first the intestine or the tapeworm? i miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. i don't mean sexually. i mean in connection with my writing. when you stop growing you start dying. as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape. how i hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity. it was trapped inside the skull... dream long enough and dream hard enough you will come to know dreaming can make it so... he is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells... happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war. the rudeness of many americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners, and on the proposition that for social purposes, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable. 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. precisely. arty type... no principles... evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in egypt. the egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (no evidence that such a thing happened with the mayans, though a number of wild cats are native to the area.) i don't think this is accurate. it is certainly not the whole story. cats didn't start as mousers. weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. i postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as familiars, and have never deviated from this function. 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. thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome american guts;thanks for a continent to despoil and poison; thanks for indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger; thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot; thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes; thanks for the american dream to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through; thanks for the kkk; for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches; for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces; thanks for kill a queer for christ stickers; thanks for laboratory aids; thanks for prohibition and the war against drugs; thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business; thanks for a nation of finks--yes,thanks for all the memories all right, lets see your arms; you always were a headache and you always were a bore; thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams. danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen. according to the legend an evil old doctor, who called himself god and us dogs, created the first boy in his adolescent image. the boy peopled the garden with male phantoms that rose from his ejaculations. this angered god, who was getting on in years. he decided it endangered his position as creator. so he crept upon the boy and anaesthetized him and made eve from his rib. henceforth all creation of beings would process through female channels. but some of adam's phantoms refused to let god near them under any pretext. i got the fear! take care of my babies. take them with you wherever you go. we're not fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings hanging off it like mafioso spaghetti. we want the whole tamale. the johnsons are taking over the western lands. we built it with our brains and our hands. we paid for it with our blood and our lives. it's ours and we're going to take it. and we are not applying in triplicate to the immortality control board. anybody gets in our way we will get our communal back against a rock or a tree and fight the way a raccoon will fight a fucking dog..