William S. Burroughs Jr. > Quotes

“The wound, as I called it, was three inches across, eighteen inches long, and as deep as my backbone. I was gutted like a Halloween pig. It couldn't be stitched up because of infection danger and I had to heal from the inside out. When the nurse first saw it, she said, "Oh my God!" Which scared me to death. Just what I needed. And it had to be washed out with saline at least three times a day and disinfected. Slosh it in with a squirting machine, suck it out with a vacuum machine. The first time I looked down at what they were doing, I said it, too: "Oh my God!" I didn't look down there again for weeks.”
― William S. Burroughs Jr., Cursed from Birth

“He felt crude and detestable”
― William Burroughs Jr

“Bill, this is serious, and despite my stable condition, I am a man and I have something of the gravest importance to ask you. PLEASE could you do this for me? SOMEwhere in the "archives" there must be a picture of Joan, your wife, my mother. Please, Bill. Father, I'm almost 33 and I don't know what my own mother looked like. Would it should it can it possibly be too much trouble to let a precariously living son see the IMAGE of his mother? Honestly, this has rankled me for years on end. This letter has certainly asked a lot. I love you, Bill. Bill Jr.”
― William S. Burroughs Jr.

“If your friends watch you go, go back.”
― William S Burroughs Jr.

“When my grandfather died, we let the roof get a little grey and the two banyans in the backyard took each other in their arms and, weeping, filled with spider webs.”
― William S. Burroughs Jr., Speed & Kentucky Ham

“I realize the necessity to go by stages when our lifestyle demands that we think and see in chunks suitable for framing.”
― William S Burroughs Jr.

“The Village is full of people who look quite alien and monstrous and I’m not speaking of hippies only, there are occasional soldiers of that lost battalion led by the man with the pincer, and the Village was dispassionately hostile to me.”
― William S. Burroughs Jr., Speed and Kentucky Ham

“Read together, these two completed narratives constitute the saga of an exemplary twentieth-century American unsentimental education, in which the generosity of Billy Burroughs’s spirit and the resilience of his voice have transformed his “surrealist desolation” into literature.”
― William S. Burroughs Jr., Speed and Kentucky Ham

“There’s a certain tear-jerking way that some people can go slowly wide-eyed before any entertainment. I watch them at movies and in shows sometimes, and if the action is good, their shoulders will slope and they turn right into open-mouthed children. Some of them are so old you wouldn’t think anything could get through to them, but the sight of one of them seen from a few feet behind, catching the glow from stage or screen lights, hits me as a miracle every time.”
― William S. Burroughs Jr., Speed and Kentucky Ham