Life & Wisdom Quote by Augusten Burroughs

Writers aren’t just curious; they’re compulsive collectors. When Augusten Burroughs calls them “experience junkies,” he’s smuggling in the language of addiction to describe a creative work ethic that can look, from the outside, like appetite and courage. The subtext is less romantic: experience becomes both fuel and alibi. You chase chaos, intimacy, risk, pain, novelty not only because you want to live, but because you want material. In Burroughs’s memoir-soaked universe, where private dysfunction becomes public narrative, that word “junkies” lands with an extra sting. It hints at the moral unease of turning life into copy, including other people’s lives.

Then comes the second pressure point: “on the outside looking in.” Burroughs captures the writer’s double posture: ravenous participation paired with strategic distance. The writer wants access, even immersion, but also wants the escape hatch of observation. That outsider angle is where sentences form and where power accrues; to narrate is to frame. It’s also a defense mechanism. If you can stand slightly apart, you can survive what you’re witnessing, and later, you can control it on the page.

Context matters: Burroughs built fame by converting messy, intimate experience into sharp, readable story. His line reads like a confession with a wry edge: writers are both in it and above it, chasing the high of living while already drafting the scene in their heads. The quote works because it doesn’t flatter the artist. It implicates.