20 quotes
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
Naked Lunch (1959)
Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets.
Naked Lunch (1959)
A functioning police state needs no police.
Naked Lunch (1959)
Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?
Naked Lunch (1959)
Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.
Naked Lunch (1959)
Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.
Naked Lunch (1959)
I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness...
Naked Lunch (1959)
A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.
Naked Lunch (1959)
The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer.
Naked Lunch (1959)
Well as, one judge said to the other, 'Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' Regret cannot observe customary obscenities.
Naked Lunch (1959)
Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.
Naked Lunch (1959)
The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.
Naked Lunch (1959)
Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face.
Naked Lunch (1959)
You see control can never be a means to any practical end. ... Control can never be a means to anything but more control ... like Junk.
Naked Lunch (1959)
The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. 'The Human Virus can now be isolated and treated.'
Naked Lunch (1959)
Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.
Naked Lunch (1959)
You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative
Naked Lunch (1959)
Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out.
Naked Lunch (1959)
The relation between an O.A. (Oblique Addict) and his R.C. (Recharge Connection) is so intense that they can only endure each other’s company for brief and infrequent intervals—I mean aside from recharge meets, when all personal contact is eclipsed by recharge process.
Naked Lunch (1959)
I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train...
Naked Lunch (1959)