"A coprophage calls for a plate, shits on it and eats the shit, exclaiming, "Mmmm, that's my rich substance.
William S. Burroughs
Born: February 5, 1914 Died: August 2, 1997
William Seward Burroughs II (5 February 1914 – 2 August 1997), more commonly known as William S. Burroughs, was an American novelist, essayist, social critic, painter and spoken word performer. Much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict, a condition that marked the last fifty years of his life. He was a central member of the Beat Generation and an avant-garde author who influenced popular culture as well as literature. In 1984 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Biographical information from: Wikiquote
Alternative Names for William S. Burroughs
Birth name - Original name given at birth:
- William Seward Burroughs II (English (en))
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.
"Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency." - William S. Burroughs
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.
Know who I am? . . . 'Good Bye Mister' is my name . . . 'Wind and Dust' is my name . . . 'Never Happened' is my name . . .
When he smiled the fear flew away in little pieces of light...
But there are higher stakes than youth or Latah, games where only two players in the world know what the stakes are.
I feel there is some hideous new force loose in the world like a creeping sickness, spreading, blighting. Remoter parts of the world seem better now, because they are less touched by it. Control, bureaucracy, regimentation, these are merely symptoms of a deeper sickness that no political or economic program can touch. What is the sickness itself?
Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often and there's a reason for that... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning.
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.
Wouldn't you?
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.
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.
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The face of 'evil' is always the face of total need.
Unquestionably, this drug is is very useful to the artist, activating trains of association that would otherwise be inaccessible, and I owe many of the scenes in Naked Lunch directly to the use of cannabis.