William S. Burroughs Quotes

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

Every choice you make has a consequence, every one. It's mathematic. It cannot fail; it never fails.

I've never done heroin, but I totally understood what would drive people to that distraction-to need that so much.

Certain things need not be said, and there’s nothing, not a whisper, prayer, not a sacrifice, not a payment of any price, that would change what’s about to happen.

There is no suspense in inevitability.

I've got nothing left to lose at this point. The work I've done is out there.

That one plant should be sown and another be produced cannot happen; whatever seed is sown, a plant of that kind even comes forth.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

I believe that everything we think and feel and do produces a result and that we have to deal with that result - that result is then something that produces another result, so on and so forth, so yes, I do believe in causality.

You can't bank on the outcome.

Anything that can happen, will happen.

We will never have 100 percent certainty except in hindsight.

The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace.

Words become deeds and then meet needs.

Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you—and kill you the long, slow, hard way.

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

Spoilers are inevitable.

Things don't happen for no reason.

Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.

Science rejects the indeterminate.

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.

Sometimes Chris wished he could sneak a peek at the back of the book, so to speak, and see how it was all going to turn out, so that he wouldn't have to bother going through the motions.

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.

To talk of luck and chance only shows how little we really know of the laws which govern cause and effect.

Everything that happens, happens of necessity.