8 William S. Burroughs Quotes on Art

William S. Burroughs quotes on art

14. Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

15. It would be certainly a very foolish thing: try paint the Internet, start making oil-on-canvas paintings out of the computer world.

18. Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

19. Kerouac (editing Naked Lunch): Bill, what is all this stuff about young naked boys being hanged in limestone caves? Burroughs: No idea. I know I'm some kind of interplanetary agent but I don't think my signals are decoding properly.

26. I think all novelists particularly are engaged in the creation of Tulpas. That is exactly what they are doing. Ahh... they are trying to create characters that have an existence apart from the novel, apart from the page.

29. Images. Millions of images. That's what I eat.

39. Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation'. Creative viewing.

55. Words, colors, light, sound, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre!... Steal anything in sight.