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Frases de William Seward Burroughs
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William Seward Burroughs fue un novelista, artista visual, ensayista y crítico social estadounidense. Renovador del lenguaje narrativo y una de las principales figuras de la Generación Beat, etiqueta con la que nunca estuvo de acuerdo. Wikipedia  

✵ 5. febrero 1914 – 2. agosto 1997  •  Otros nombres William Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs Foto
William Seward Burroughs: 120 citas4 Me gusta

Frases célebres de William Seward Burroughs

“La droga es el producto ideal…La mercancía definitiva. No hace falta literatura para vender. El cliente se arrastrará por una alcantarilla para suplicar que le vendan…El comerciante de droga no vende su producto al consumidor, vende el consumidor a su producto. No mejora ni simplifica su mercancía. Degrada y simplifica al cliente.”

William Seward Burroughs

Fuente:“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client”.
Fuente: "Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs", escrita en 1956, publicada por primera vez en The British Journal of Addiction, Vol. 52, No. 2 (enero 1957), p.1, y después usada como nota al pie en Naked Lunch.

“Como dijo un juez a otro: "sé justo, y si no puedes ser justo, sé arbitrario".”

William Seward Burroughs

Original en inglés: “Well as, one judge said to the other, 'Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' Regret cannot observe customary obscenities”..
Fuente: Naked Lunch del capítulo "And Start West", p.5 y capítulo "Lazarus Go Home", p.62.

“Durante el período de carencia, el adicto es extremadamente consciente de su entorno. Las impresiones sensitivas se intensifican hasta llegar a convertirse en alucinaciones. Los objetos familiares parecen agitarse con una vida furtiva y temblorosa.”

William Seward Burroughs

“Nuestra droga nacional es el alcohol. Tendemos a considerar el uso de cualquier otra droga con especial horror.”

William Seward Burroughs

Original en inglés:“Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror”.
Fuente: "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness", p.201.

“En general la resistencia está en manos de aventureros que se proponen superar y desplazar a los jefes actuales.”

William Seward Burroughs

“Hasta que tengamos un conocimiento más preciso de la electrónica del cerebro, las drogas seguirán siendo una herramienta esencial del interrogador en su ataque a la identidad del sujeto.”

William Seward Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs Frases y Citas

“Soy un fantasma que desea lo que todos los fantasmas -un cuerpo- después del largo tiempo que estuve cruzando avenidas inodoras del espacio sin vida al no olor incoloro de la muerte…”

William Seward Burroughs

“En su mundo de oscuridad total los ojos y la boca son un órgano que salta hacia delante para morder con dientes transparentes…”

William Seward Burroughs

“Desperté de la enfermedad a los cuarenta y cinco años, sereno, cuerdo y en bastante buen estado de salud, a no ser por un hígado algo resentido y ese aspecto de llevar la carne de prestado que tienen todos los que sobreviven a la enfermedad…”

William Seward Burroughs

Original en inglés:“I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness…”
Fuente: Speaking the Unspeakable: A Poetics of Obscenity Escrito por Peter Michelson en 1993. 312 pp.

William Seward Burroughs: Frases en inglés

“Consider the impasse of a one-God universe. He is all-knowing and all-powerful. He can't go anywhere, since He is already everywhere. He can't do anything, since the act of doing presupposes opposition. His universe is irrevocably thermodynamic, having no friction by definition. So, He has to create friction: War, Fear, Sickness, Death, to keep his dying show on the road.”

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William S. Burroughs libro The Western Lands

lyric from spoken-word recording "A One God Universe," featured on Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, paraphrased by Burroughs from The Western Lands, p. 113
The Western Lands (1987)

“America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.”

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William S. Burroughs libro Naked Lunch

Opening Chapter
Naked Lunch (1959)

“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.”

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William S. Burroughs libro Naked Lunch

Benway
Naked Lunch (1959)

“"A curse," said Lee. "Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: 'homosexual'. I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted simpering female impersonators I'd seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion- just a minute, Doctore Kildare, this isn't your script. I might as well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought to die a man than life on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen - Bob, we called her- who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink."”

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William S. Burroughs

Fuente: Queer: A Novel (1985), Chapter Three

“A functioning police state needs no police.”

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William S. Burroughs libro Naked Lunch

From the chapter entitled "Benway", p. 31
Naked Lunch (1959)

“Junk is an inoculation of death that keeps the body in a condition of emergency”

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William S. Burroughs libro Junkie

Junkie (1953)

“The relation between an O. A. (Oblique Addict) and his R. C. (Recharge Connection) is so intense that they can only endure each other’s company for brief and infrequent intervals—I mean aside from recharge meets, when all personal contact is eclipsed by recharge process.”

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William S. Burroughs libro Naked Lunch

Habit Notes continued
Naked Lunch (1959)

“The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In 'Naked Lunch', 'Soft Machine' and 'Nova Express' I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested. Minutes to go. Souls rotten from their orgasm drugs, flesh shuddering from their nova ovens, prisoners of the earth to 'come out'. With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly”

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William S. Burroughs libro Nova Express

Fuente: Nova Express (1968), Chapter One, Prisoners, Come Out

“Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit --- Kid, it was tasty.”

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William S. Burroughs libro Naked Lunch

Opening Chapter
Naked Lunch (1959)

“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train…”

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William S. Burroughs libro Naked Lunch

Opening Chapter
Naked Lunch (1959)

“So he imports this special breed of scorpions and feeds them on metal meal and the scorpions turned a phosphorescent blue color and sort of hummed. “Now we must find a worthy vessel,” he said. So we flush out this old goof ball artist and put the scorpion to him and he turned sort of blue and you could see he was fixed right to metal. These scorpions could travel on a radar beam and service the clients after Doc copped for the bread. It was a good thing while it lasted and the heat couldn’t touch us. However all these scorpion junkies began to glow in the dark and if they didn’t score on the hour metamorphosed into scorpions straight away. So there was a spot of bother and we had to move on disguised as young junkies on the way to Lexington. Bill and Johnny we sorted out the names but they keep changing like one day I would wake up as Bill the next day as Johnny. So there we are in the train compartment shivering junk sick our eyes watering and burning.”

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William S. Burroughs libro The Soft Machine

Fuente: The Soft Machine (1961), Chapter One: "Dead on Arrival"

“You sometimes wake up from a dream and think, "Thank God, I didn't really do that!" Reconstructing a period of blackout you think, "My God, did I really do that?" The line between saying and thinking is blurred. Did you say it or just think it?”

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William S. Burroughs libro Junkie

Junkie (1953)

“Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down his ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs.”

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William S. Burroughs

Fuente: Queer: A Novel (1985), Chapter Two

“Many so called primitives are afraid of cameras. They think it can capture their soul and take it away. There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, sexual intensity, a sexual intensity of pursuit.”

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William S. Burroughs

Two Years Later: Mexico City Return
Queer: A Novel (1985)

“Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.”

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William S. Burroughs libro Junkie

Junkie (1953)

“Mexico city is a terminal of space-time travel, a waiting room where you grab a quick drink while you wait for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City or New York. You are not struck; by the fact of being there at all, you are traveling. But in Panama, crossroads of the world, you are exactly so much aging tissue. You have to make arrangements with Pan Am or the Dutch Line for removal of your body. Otherwise, it would stay there and rot in muggy heat, under a galvanized iron roof.”

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William S. Burroughs

Two Years Later: Mexico City Return
Queer: A Novel (1985)

“Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh. Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke.”

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William S. Burroughs libro Junkie

Junkie (1953)

“Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.”

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William S. Burroughs libro The Ticket That Exploded

The Ticket That Exploded (1962)

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”

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William S. Burroughs

"Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs", written in 1956, first published in The British Journal of Addiction, Vol. 52, No. 2 (January 1957), p. 1 and later used as footnotes in Naked Lunch

“I lay down and tried to sleep. When I closed my eyes I saw an Oriental face, the lips and nose eaten by disease. The disease spread, melting the face into an amoeboid mass in which the eyes floated, dull crustacean eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can no longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it.”

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William S. Burroughs libro Junkie

Junkie (1953)

“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”

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William S. Burroughs

Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs (2000)

““Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.”

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William S. Burroughs libro Naked Lunch

Benway
Naked Lunch (1959)

“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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William S. Burroughs libro Naked Lunch

Atrophied Preface
Naked Lunch (1959)

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client”

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William S. Burroughs libro Naked Lunch

Introduction
Naked Lunch (1959)

“Tea heads are gregarious, they are sensitive, and they are paranoiac. If you get to be known as a "drag" or a "bring down," you can't do business with them.”

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William S. Burroughs libro Junkie

Junkie (1953)

“As a young child Audrey Carsons wanted to be writers 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.”

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William S. Burroughs

"The Lemon Kid"
Exterminator! A Novel (1971)

“Brainwashing, psychotropic drugs, lobotomy, and other more subtle form of psychosurgery; the technocratic control apparatus of the United States has at its fingertips new techniques if which fully exploited could make Orwell's 1984 seem like a benevolent utopia.”

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William S. Burroughs libro The Adding Machine: Collected Essays

"The Limits of Control"
The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (1985)

“You see control can never be a means to any practical end. … Control can never be a means to anything but more control … like Junk.”

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William S. Burroughs libro Naked Lunch

Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone
Naked Lunch (1959)

“Before my father started using morphine again he sent me to a Japanese person to learn something called Karate. I learn these things fast because I am blank inside, and I have no special way of moving or doing things so one way is the same to me as another. ‘”

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William S. Burroughs libro The Wild Boys

The Wild Boys (1971)

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