William S. Burroughs Biography Quotes 35 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
William Seward Burroughs II was born on February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, into a family whose name was already widely known through his grandfather, inventor William Seward Burroughs I, associated with the adding machine and what became the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs grew up amid Midwestern respectability and a degree of financial security that later allowed him intermittent independence from salaried work. He attended private schools and cultivated interests atypical of his milieu, including a fascination with firearms, psychic phenomena, and the margins of social life. After matriculating at Harvard University, he graduated in 1936 with a degree in English. Exposure to European culture during travel in the late 1930s broadened his outlook and fueled a lifelong sense that literary innovation required crossing borders, both geographic and psychological.

Formation of a Literary Circle
In the early 1940s Burroughs settled in New York City, where he fell in with a loosely connected group of writers and drifters whose frank discussion of sex, drugs, crime, and spirituality would reshape American literature. Through Lucien Carr he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; through the streetwise stories of Herbert Huncke he encountered an argot and reality that later imbued his prose. He was older than many of the others and, in certain respects, a mentor figure: cosmopolitan, sardonic, and curiously methodical about taboo experience. With Joan Vollmer, an incisive, brilliant presence in the circle, he found both a partner and a sparring intellect, even as their shared drug use and precarious finances made stability elusive. During these years Burroughs began to take notes that would evolve into his early novels, while observing the discipline and structure that counterbalanced his appetite for risk.

Exile, Tragedy, and the Making of a Writer
A fateful move to Mexico City in 1949 led to the tragedy that marked Burroughs for life. In 1951, in a drunken mishap often retold as a misguided William Tell routine, he shot and killed Joan Vollmer. The event devastated him and became the dark axis around which his subsequent work revolved. He later implied that the catastrophe compelled him to become a writer in earnest. Almost immediately he began shaping the material that would be published as Junky (1953), a terse, unsentimental account of heroin addiction and the economies and rituals that surround it. He used the pseudonym William Lee, signaling both autobiographical candor and a desire to create narrative distance. He also drafted Queer, but its candid treatment of homosexuality and the rawness of its perspective delayed publication for decades.

Tangier, Paris, and the Birth of Naked Lunch
Burroughs spent much of the mid-1950s in Tangier, then an international zone whose fluid legal and cultural boundaries made it a magnet for expatriates. While there he knew Paul Bowles and other literary figures, and he continued to write amid cycles of addiction and withdrawal. The manuscript that emerged from Tangier was chaotic, powerful, and vast. With help from Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who typed, edited, and encouraged him, Burroughs shaped the material into Naked Lunch (1959). Published by Olympia Press in Paris, the book shattered conventional narrative with scenes of bureaucratic nightmare, medical horror, and black comedy. It was prosecuted for obscenity in the United States but ultimately prevailed, contributing to the dismantling of legal regimes that policed literary content. The success and notoriety of Naked Lunch placed Burroughs at the center of a new avant-garde that treated language as a virus and the state as a machine of control.

The Cut-Up Method and the Nova Trilogy
In Paris, particularly at the so-called Beat Hotel, Burroughs met the painter and writer Brion Gysin, whose chance discovery of a collage technique became the cut-up method when applied to text. Working with Gysin and the technician and companion Ian Sommerville, Burroughs sliced and rearranged words, paragraphs, and entire pages to produce startling juxtapositions that he claimed revealed hidden messages and disrupted authoritarian programming. The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964) formed the Nova Trilogy, extending Naked Lunchs critique of control across multiple dimensions: language, media, and the body. The books proposed that social orders encode themselves in habits of speech and perception; to resist them one must deform language itself. Alongside the novels, Burroughs experimented with tape recorders and early audio manipulations, making short films and recordings that circulated within an underground network.

Experiments, Countercultures, and Critique
During the 1960s and 1970s Burroughs ranged between Europe and the United States, aligning with countercultural currents without surrendering his skeptical distance. He attended and occasionally taught at alternative institutions, gave readings, and issued manifestos. The Electronic Revolution outlined his theory of tape-recorded cut-ups as tools of subversion in public space. He explored and later criticized systems such as Scientology, testing their claims against his own preoccupation with control and conditioning. Filmmaker Antony Balch collaborated with him on experimental shorts, while poets and editors like John Giorno helped distribute his audio work. He was both insider and outsider to the Beat movement: admired by younger writers such as Gregory Corso and in correspondence with figures like Neal Cassady, yet always more interested in method than in belonging.

Return to America and Later Fiction
By the 1970s Burroughs was a visible presence in New York, living for a time in a converted locker room nicknamed the Bunker and participating in the downtown arts scene. Readings with Allen Ginsberg drew large audiences, and his interviews, collected in volumes such as The Job, articulated a late-modern view of authority and addiction that influenced musicians and novelists alike. A renewed phase of long-form fiction culminated in the trilogy Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987), where historical fantasy, occult speculation, and sardonic realism converge. He also produced essays and shorter works, including The Cat Inside, reflecting his deep attachment to cats, and continued to refine his idea that narrative could serve as a technology for disengaging from oppressive systems.

Collaborations Across Media
Burroughs became a sought-after collaborator for artists across genres. Brion Gysin remained a central creative partner, and later, musicians in rock and experimental scenes drew on his voice and texts. He recorded spoken-word pieces and appeared on albums, most famously in a stark collaboration with Kurt Cobain. His gravelly delivery and mordant humor lent themselves to performance, whether on stage or in the studio. In film he played a memorable cameo in Drugstore Cowboy and consulted on adaptations, while visual art offered yet another outlet: in Kansas he made paintings by discharging shotguns at paint-laden targets, turning his fascination with ballistics into an aesthetic practice. These cross-disciplinary ventures were facilitated and organized in part by James Grauerholz, who managed Burroughss affairs and helped shape his public presence from the late 1970s onward.

Personal Life and Relationships
Burroughs identified as homosexual, an orientation that shaped both his social world and his writing at a time when such candor was risky. His relationship with Joan Vollmer remained a haunting anchor in his personal mythology, and he spoke of her intelligence with reverence. He had a son, William S. Burroughs Jr., who became a writer himself, author of Speed and Kentucky Ham. The younger Burroughs struggled with addiction and died in 1981, a loss that echoed the familys long entanglement with dependency. Throughout his life Burroughs balanced extreme experiences with regimentation: careful note-taking, regular writing hours, and a systematic pursuit of new techniques. Cats were constant companions, and his homes were carefully ordered spaces that nonetheless accommodated the unpredictable visitors and collaborations that kept his imagination active.

Later Years in Kansas
In 1981 Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where he lived for the rest of his life. The college town offered quiet, a community of friends and readers, and room for his increasingly visible role as an elder of the avant-garde. He continued to write, paint, and perform, participated in local life with surprising modesty, and hosted younger artists who came to pay respects. Though the scandal of earlier decades had long since morphed into canonical status, he remained wary of institutions and clung to the ethic of experiment. Health issues accumulated but did not silence him, and he kept up a disciplined routine of journal-keeping and artistic production.

Influence and Legacy
Burroughss impact extends across literature, music, film, and visual art. He is central to the Beat Generation with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, yet he also helped set the stage for postmodern and cyberpunk sensibilities with his paranoia-soaked visions of surveillance and control. David Bowie and other musicians adopted the cut-up method, while novelists and filmmakers found in his work a grammar for depicting systems that shape desire and thought. The obscenity battles around Naked Lunch helped erode censorship regimes in the United States. Archives of his manuscripts, letters, and recordings have ensured that scholars can trace the evolution of his ideas and methods. He died on August 2, 1997, in Lawrence, Kansas, following a heart attack, leaving behind a body of work that continues to provokes, puzzles, and equips readers to question the languages that bind them.

Selected Themes and Methods
Across genres Burroughs returned to certain concerns: addiction as a model for how power circulates; language as a vector of control; and technology as both instrument and metaphor. His cut-up collaborations with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville were not mere stunts but propositions about how to break the feedback loops of habit. The Nova Trilogy elaborated a world where agents of control traveled through texts and tapes; later novels tested whether mythic structures could offer escape routes. Even in his most brutal scenes, a mordant humor flickers. Friends and collaborators from Paul Bowles to James Grauerholz witnessed how controversy coexisted with generosity, and how the man behind the legend kept searching for the lever that, once pulled, might pry open a new sentence and a new freedom.

Our collection contains 35 quotes who is written by William, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Meaning of Life.

Other people realated to William: William Gibson (Writer), Allen Ginsberg (Poet), Patti Smith (Musician), Laurie Anderson (Musician), Tom Waits (Musician), Kathy Acker (Activist), David Cronenberg (Director), John Clellon Holmes (Writer), Gus Van Sant (Director), Gregory Corso (Poet)

• William S Burroughs wife: William S. Burroughs’ wife was Joan Vollmer; their relationship ended tragically in 1951 when he accidentally shot and killed her in Mexico City.
• William S Burroughs movies: Burroughs inspired the film “Naked Lunch” (1991), and appeared in or is featured in documentaries such as “Burroughs” (1983), “William S. Burroughs: A Man Within” (2010), and “Drugstore Cowboy” (1989, cameo).
• Jack Kerouac William S Burroughs: Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were central Beat Generation writers and friends; they co‑wrote the novel “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” based on a real 1944 murder case.
• William S Burroughs Dead Souls: “Dead Souls” is a term associated with Burroughs’ later work, especially the “Red Night” trilogy, where he explores themes of souls, control, and the afterlife in books like “Cities of the Red Night” and “The Western Lands.”
• William S Burroughs books in order: Key William S. Burroughs books in rough publication order include: “Junkie” (1953), “Naked Lunch” (1959), “The Soft Machine” (1961), “The Ticket That Exploded” (1962), “Nova Express” (1964), “The Wild Boys” (1971), “Cities of the Red Night” (1981), “The Place of Dead Roads” (1983), and “The Western Lands” (1987).
• William S Burroughs Jr: William S. Burroughs Jr. (1947–1981) was Burroughs’ son, also a writer, known for the novels “Speed” and “Kentucky Ham,” which describe his struggles with addiction.
• William S Burroughs Kurt Cobain: William S. Burroughs and Kurt Cobain collaborated on the 1993 spoken‑word/music piece “The ‘Priest’ They Called Him,” and Cobain admired Burroughs’ writing and outsider persona.
• How old was William S. Burroughs? He became 83 years old

• Wikipedia