Life & Wisdom Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs praising practicality in cats sounds like a cozy aphorism until you remember who’s talking: the patron saint of junk-sick paranoia and anti-bourgeois disgust. The line is a smuggled insult. “Pure creatures” isn’t Hallmark innocence; it’s purity as freedom from human self-deception. Cats don’t moralize, rationalize, or build narratives to excuse their cravings. They want warmth, food, distance, contact, and they negotiate for it with exquisite efficiency. Practicality becomes a kind of spiritual cleanliness.

The subtext is Burroughs’s long war on sentimentality. Humans, in his work, are forever inventing alibis for their appetites - sex, power, drugs, control - dressing compulsion up as destiny or romance or ideology. Cats skip the costume drama. They don’t confuse need with meaning, and that restraint reads as “pure.” It’s a deliberately skewed compliment: the animal looks virtuous mainly because the human looks ridiculous.

Context matters. Burroughs wrote from a century of systems - policing, medicine, advertising, government - that he believed trained people to betray their own bodies and impulses, then sell that betrayal back as civilization. The cat, in this frame, is an anarchist in fur: sovereign, opportunistic, skeptical of authority, allergic to coercion. Calling cats “practical” is Burroughs’s sideways endorsement of a life lived without apology, and his warning that our most elaborate ideals often function as elaborate evasions.