Quotenik
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William S. Burroughs

(1914–1997)

U.S. novelist, poet, essayist, and spoken word performer

“You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I’m creating an imaginary—it’s always imaginary—world in which I would like to live.”

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source: “The Art of Fiction No. 36,” The Paris Review, interviewed by Conrad Knickerbocker, Fall 1965.

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medium: Interview

“I’ve recently done a lot of experiments with scrapbooks. I’ll read in the newspaper something that reminds me of or has relation to something I’ve written. I’ll cut out the picture or article and paste it in a scrapbook beside the words from my book. Or, I’ll be walking down the street and I’ll suddenly see a scene from my book and I’ll photograph it and put it in a scrapbook…In other words, I’ve been interested in precisely how word and image get around on very, very complex association lines.”

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source: “The Art of Fiction No. 36,” The Paris Review, interviewed by Conrad Knickerbocker, Fall 1965.

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medium: Interview

“Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That’s a cut-up.”

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source: “The Art of Fiction No. 36,” The Paris Review, interviewed by Conrad Knickerbocker, Fall 1965.

category: , ,

medium: Interview

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