William S. Burroughs Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• 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.

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, Psychics, Space

  William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.272, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

• 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.

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, Creating, Islands

  The Paris Review Interview, Fall 1965.

• 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.

  William S. Burroughs

  Pain, Writing, Mean

• It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.

  William S. Burroughs

  Art, Writing, Mean

  "Ales Kot's highly ambitious Zero explores the deep roots of violence" by Shea Hennum and Oliver Sava, www.avclub.com. July 22, 2015.

• You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, Thinking, Order

• Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

  William S. Burroughs

  Book, Writing, Exercise

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

• There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose "story" "plot" "continuity"... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer.

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, Psychics, Plot

  William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.169, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

• Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

  William S. Burroughs

  Art, Writing, Pages

  William S. Burroughs (2001). “Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997”, Semiotext

• All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war. "There's no place for impractical dreamers around here," that's what they always say. "Your writing activities will be directed, kindly stop horsing around." "As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers." Both favor alcohol and are against pot.

  William S. Burroughs

  War, Writing, Marijuana

  William S. Burroughs, Allen Hibbard (1999). “Conversations with William S. Burroughs”, p.4, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, Cutting, Artist

  William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin (1982). “Re/search #4/5: A Special Book Issue”

• The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, Criminals, Purpose

  William S. Burroughs (2011). “Nova Express”, p.7, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

• I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself.

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, Thinking, Audience

• Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, Reality

  William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz (2001). “Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs”, p.16, Grove Press

• I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.

  William S. Burroughs

  Strong, Motivation, Writing

• [Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me...he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, Fiction, Made

  Source: www.litkicks.com

• Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.

  William S. Burroughs

  Art, Writing, Hands

  William S. Burroughs (2001). “Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997”, Semiotext

• I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South.

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, Southern, Labels

  Source: www.litkicks.com

• So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, People, World

  Source: www.stopsmilingonline.com

• It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.

  William S. Burroughs

  Art, Writing, Magic

• Life is a cutup. And to pretend that you write or paint in a timeless vacuum is just simply . . . not . . . true, not in accord with the facts of human perception.

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, Perception, Vacuums

  Source: sensitiveskinmagazine.com

• England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.

  William S. Burroughs

  Writing, Order, Giving

  Forbes Magazine (p. 172), April 2, 2001.

• Always remember, there's no point trying to be faithful to the book because film and writing are just two completely different things. Any film stands on its own, apart from whether it's based on a novel.

  William S. Burroughs

  Book, Writing, Two

  Source: sensitiveskinmagazine.com

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