Peter Mcardle > Peter's Quotes

“I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.”
― William Stafford

“Those who champion democracy, but make a fetish of never accepting anything they don't agree with -- what advantage do they see in democracy?”
― William Edgar Stafford, Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War

“You purchase pain with all that joy can give and die of nothing but a rage to live.”
― Alexander Pope, Moral Essays

“The beautiful is always bizarre.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
― Banksy

“It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

“There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.”
― William S. Burroughs

“The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [Paperback]

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”
― Peter Gasser

“Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”
― William S. Burroughs

“If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.”
― William S. Burroughs

“I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.”
― William S. Burroughs

“In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.”
― William Burroughs

“There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads

“Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain't worth a shit -- not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.”
― William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals

“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”
― William S. Burroughs

“There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?”
― William S. Burroughs, Exterminator!

“Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.”
― William S. Burroughs, Dead City Radio

“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.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.”
― William S. Burroughs, Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953-1957

“There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.”
― William S. Burroughs

“How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Open your mind and let the pictures out”
― William S. Burroughs

“To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life…”
― William S. Burroughs

“as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.”
― William S. Burroughs, My Education: A Book of Dreams

“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.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays