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"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..."
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"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done."
"Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing."
"Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do- to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street."
"T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others."
"I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months. Any longer and - for me, at least - the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity."
"Some people write letters, in the library."
"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."
Explore more quotes by William S. Burroughs
"The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets."
"A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering."
"Two Lesbian Agents with glazed faces of grafted penis flesh sat sipping spinal fluid through alabaster straws."
"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape."
"Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact."
"The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility."
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