"He covered tons of paper with his words and made them his very own words... he branded them like cattle he rustled out there on the free ranges of Literature... Used by another writer who was attempting cut-ups, one single word of Burroughs vocabulary could ruin a whole barrel of good everyday words, run the literary rot right through them. One sniff of that prose and you'd say, 'Why, that's a Burroughs.'"

Brion Gysin Literature See all quotes by Brion Gysin →

React to this quote

More by Brion Gysin

“Of course the sands of Present Time are running out from under our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum: 'What are we here for?' is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. The answer to the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. Who runs may read but few people run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!”

“Writing is fifty years behind painting.”

“I enjoy inventing things out of fun. After all, life is a game, not a career.”

“The Way Is Nor This Nor That.”

“I view life as a fortuitous collaboration ascribable to the fact that one finds oneself at the right place at the same time.”

“I may write only what I know in space: I am that I am.”

Resonant Thoughts

"A "new" language that differs from the rest of the crop by one or a couple features is proof positive that both what it came from and what it has become are mutations about to die. There are tens if n…"

— Erik Naggum

Technology1965–2009

#life

"Which European politician of the first half of the twentieth century could be relied on to read the philosophical and literary works of his co-nationals and send their authors notes of criticism and c…"

— R.J.B. Bosworth

1943

#writing

"The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention…"

— Vannevar Bush

Technology1890–1974

#books

"The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts. Old age or youth-one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age. We lack the measure of…"

— Jacques Derrida

Philosophy1930–2004

#writing