William S. Burroughs Quotes

One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her and did not leave her until the night closed in catastrophe for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.

I had to test a new terror in myself.

All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.

Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn't, there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow, hard, bare and dark space a lot of us spend their lives.

Sometimes I feel I'm living a meaningless life, and I get frightened.

We are not surprised to learn that panic and confusion are hourly gaining ground in Britain.

I'm out of control.

The thought of real-life scares me to death.

I am gripped by an existential panic.

There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.

Life is a dream in the night, a fear among fears, A naked runner lost in a storm of spears.

Terror?often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.

Now panic beats and flutters inside my skull like a flock of starlings locked in an attic.

There are some days where, at the end of the day, you've done OK. It's the most out-of-control feeling you possibly can have.

The fear of death in the one place was not as strong as another kind of fear, the fear of a world gone crazy, a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be trusted, where nothing was certain. A terrible place.

Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear.

Fear is a disease that eats away at logic and makes man inhuman.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

Man's greatest fear is chaos.

Sometimes when I'm going to the supermarket to get the coffee and cat litter, I get freaked out and see all these people staring, and you turn around and there's, like, 40 people all looking at you... and when you go around the corner, they're all following you! You start freaking out like a trapped animal.

I got this idea about being afraid to let go of something and being afraid of sinking into a state of almost anesthesia, where you have to trust other people. Just the paranoia of it all. And it seemed to suit the frenetic track. So I just wrote it out and, you know, said it.

'House of Leaves' is certainly about the unsettling nature of fear - and it was my aim to address that - but it's also about recovering from fear.

What else does anxiety about the future bring you but sorrow upon sorrow?

Any horror element is as much psychological as special effects.