Talk:William S. Burroughs

Egyptian

Anyone think the Egyptian soul bit is a bit too long and involved to be included here? I haven't read the book it's from but jeez it seems like we have most of a chapter here.24.3.229.31

Last Words : The Final Journals of William Burroughs

Hello,
I'm working on Burroughs' page on the french wikiquote and I would like to find original citations from Last Words : The Final Journals of William Burroughs (1997). If anyone owns this book please leave me a message,
Bye.
P.S. – Sorry if this is not the right place to post this kind of request. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by MyXiLo (talk • contribs) 11:11, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

This is certainly a reasonable place for this request. I don't have the 1997 edition, but I can get a 2000 edition at my library. Let me know if you'd like me to do this. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 12:36, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

It would be great if you can get it. It's not an heavy work (6 quotes, maybe a little more) so it won't take too long. Thanks a lot. MyXiLo 13:15, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I should have it within a week. (It's coming from a remote branch.) Let me know what you're looking for. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 13:23, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

You can find the french quotes on my page. I've given you the days from the journal, and you'll also find the pages from my french translation(actually it won't really help). Do you speak french? If you're not I'll make some summaries or anything that would help. Thanks again. MyXiLo 13:38, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I have not answered what you've asked me : I'm looking for the original quotes from the translated ones I have. MyXiLo 13:51, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Ce n'est pas une problème — je parle français, un peu. I should have no difficulty finding the quotes you list, even in a different edition. I'll let you know. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:45, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. MyXiLo 19:37, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Anybody ? MyXiLo 20:29, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Rejected as spam when I tried to save the WSB quotes:

• p s i k e b a .com.ar/articulos/AVRburroughs.htm William Burroughs Studies |In Psikeba

Unsourced

Published sources should be provided before moving these back into the article

• A paranoid is someone who has all the facts. Chicago Reader: "William Burroughs, Unabridged" Better version might be: "Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts." [see here]

• A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what’s going on.

• 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.

• Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

• Kerouac (editing Naked Lunch): Bill, what is all this stuff about young naked boys being hanged in limestone caves?
  Burroughs: No idea. I know I'm some kind of interplanetary agent but I don't think my signals are decoding properly.

• Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece.

• General procedure: Read and learn all you can about problem. Look at problem from a point of zero preconception. Devise variations and alternative solutions. Check back to see if your solution has workable advantage over solutions previously arrived at . . . To carry the method a step further than solution of purely technical problem where purpose is implicit in the artifact: devising more efficient gun, tool, boat, signal system, medical or interrogation procedure.

• Heroin is a vitamin...don't let anyone tell you different heroin IS a vitamin...there's nothing in the game plan...that says that all vitamins have to be good for you. (this is entirely the work of an impersonator who distributed audio files posthumously, along with several of the others in this category)

• I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them.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. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.

• I think all novelists particularly are engaged in the creation of Tulpas. That is exactly what they are doing. Ahh... they are trying to create characters that have an existence apart from the novel, apart from the page.

• If you're doing business with a religious son-of-a-bitch, get it in writing. His word isn't worth shit. Not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.from the track "Words of Advice"

• I'm running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money.

• Images. Millions of images. That's what I eat.

• I say we are here in human form to learn by the human hieroglyphs of love and suffering. 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 reserve or defense.

• It would be certainly a very foolish thing: try paint the Internet, start making oil-on-canvas paintings out of the computer world.
  • "Conversations" (1996)

• Jesus Christ, by their fruits ye shall know them, not by their disclaimers.
  • On Kerouac's later apparent disavowals of Beat creeds

• Language is a virus.
  • Variant: Language is a virus from outer space.
  • Variant: Language is obviously a virus as it depends on replication.
  • Variant: The word us a virus (Ten Years and a Billion Dollars reprinted in The Adding Machine, essay written in 1971?, p. 51)
  • Used as a song title by Laurie Anderson

• Love! What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE
  • This is credited in "Last Words" as his final journal entry. I don't have it in front of me so I can't give you a date on it.

• Madness is confusion of levels of fact... Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.

• 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.

• 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.

• Never give succor to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit.

• No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.

• 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.

• Now the perpetrating of miracles constitutes a brazen attempt to loosen up the universe. When you set up something as MIRACLE, you deny the very concept of FACT, establish a shadowy and spurious court infested by every variety of coyote and shady fixer beyond Court of Fact.

• Shoot the bitch and write a book. That's what I did.

• Son, never listen to a priest or a policeman...the only thing they have is the key to the shithouse.

• Survive, it's the name of the game. Would I give a shit about these people?

• The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right.

• There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

• There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.

• There's something wrong with that boy. He frowns for no good reason.
  • To his secretary after a visit from Kurt Cobain

• Thou shalt not be such a shit, you don't know you are one.

• Thou shalt not blow pot-smoke into the face of my pet. Say's whom who want's to get high.

• Thou shalt not drop an atom bomb or even shit one out in the first place - I'm talking to you, Robert Oppenheimer.

• 'Treatment is symptomatic' - which means in the trade there is none.

• When I become death, death is the seed from which I grow.

• Word is a virus.

• Words, colors, light, sound, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre!... Steal anything in sight.

Psychotic variations

Seen a couple variations of this floating around attributed to him:

• A psychotic is just a guy who's found out what's going on
• A psychotic is just a guy who finally figured out what the hell was going on

Any idea as to whether fake or real? 64.231.171.12 05:29, 12 June 2019 (UTC)