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"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."
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"Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part."

"My approach to acting is that I am totally intuitive. I read the script and I get it. If I don't get it, I can't do it."

"I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting."

"There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane."

"The thing I hate most in acting is asking permission to do things. What you really want to do is say, 'This is my need; this is what's going to get me further; this is what's going to be alive. I don't ever say, 'Do you mind if...?' I just come in and do it."

"Acting is something different to everybody. I just know that if you watch an actor or actress getting better and better, I think that's them just understanding themselves better and better."

"I really think that effective acting has to do literally with the movement of molecules."

"I was just a cheap little starlet hardly acting at all in a very mediocre film."
Explore more quotes by William S. Burroughs

"I don't know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don't even have a word for love-that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept. As to what falling in love means, I'm uncertain. Love, well, it means simply physical attraction and liking a person at the same time."

"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."

"We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems."

"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."

"When I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow."

"There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?"

"As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle."

"Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life."
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