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"Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! À bas l'originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight."
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Exlpore more Creativity quotes
"For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose."
"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
"At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air."
"I have spent a good many years since-too many, I think-being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all."
"He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn't the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?"
"When you aren't satisfied with what has already been done, make something better. That is the greatest responsibility and the true freedom of creativity. The freedom is in that it doesn't need to complain."
"Fresh, solid ideas feel like gifts to writers, therefore every morning is Christmas."
"We write to shed our sorrows and give strength to our spirit."
"My pen beats faster as I write with my heart."
"How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)
Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, and skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity.
Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came."
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."
"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."
"Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugly Spirit."
"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."
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