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William Burroughs Said

Language is a virus from outer space.
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
So 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.
Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.
Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
Well as, one judge said to the other, 'Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' Regret cannot observe customary obscenities.
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

The word virus has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.

William S. Burroughs Quotes

(found this by someone named Brent Wood writing about Burroughs characterizing Language/Words as a Control Virus)

What Burroughs terms the viral function of language is its ongoing ordering of reality toward the limit of total control, the opposite of anarchy. He employs the figure of the virus, a force hovering between evolving being and mere replicator, to problematize conventional definitions of living and non-living.9 In Burroughs' cosmos, one must always remember that the words one transmits can never be neutral moves in the universal language-game; even if misfiring, some sort of force is necessarily being transmitted. This is the very problem addressed by Csicsery-Ronay when he cites Jameson's skepticism over sf's linguistic aporia. It is exceptionally difficult for any resistant message to avoid complicity with the dominant communication systems in whose language it is composed. If “a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo can cause a tornado in Toledo” (Porush 381), who knows what havoc a few well-chosen words could wreak in the infosphere? As responsible cyborg-writers, we'd best have a good idea how the “techsts” we use are going to function out there before we turn them loose. The trick, argues Burroughs, is to transmit a kind of force that doesn't immediately contribute to the virus-effect but can actually help work against it. The fold-in is the principle textual method of guerilla resistance against the virus (or, as Burroughs puts it in his science-fictional work, against the Nova Conspiracy); one takes a strongly linear form like the typewritten word, cuts it, and reassembles it such that its ordinative powers are deactivated.10 As apomorphine was Burroughs' antidote to morphine addiction, so silence is the antidote to word-addiction and the fold-in to order-addiction.11 This resistance, in Burroughs' work, is the only option under the circumstances of total occupation by Control.

Below an excerpt from The Book Of Night an example of Burroughs influence on my writing.

Faux images burning pages glue into smoky emerald eyes seeing through ages and raging fools staging chicken coop coups stimulating concoctions of stupid soup sue you too will never learn that which is not available for common natural study buddy old pal with complexions lost connexxions so ruddy rat the household cats and dogs wearing mirror masks to snout their grog.

Poetry by Chaucer Whethers