Friday, July 13, 2007

Quote-Unquote

"As a child, I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in yellow pongee silk suits. 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 stroking a pet gazelle."
-William S. Burroughs, although really nobody else could have written that sentence.

2 comments:

Holly said...

He didn't care if it made sense to you. Hell, I'm not sure he cared if it made sense to him. His work only had to make sense to itself. His role was central, only because you can't see the inside of a geode if SOMEONE doesn't break it open. For me, that is an ecstatic state, so few creative types actually attain it. Probably worse than 7 reincarnations of sitar practice.

Rufus said...

I recently started reading The Ticket That Exploded, and I'm most impressed by how self-contained his world is. You suspect that the secret agents, centipedes, nefarious doctors, rectal mucus, and mugwumps will appear before long. He reminds me of the observation that somebody once made that, if we never had Newton, somebody would have eventually figured out the laws of motion; but if we never had Shakespeare, we would never have had Macbeth. If we never had Burroughs, we never would have had anything like Burroughs.