Beat generation Quote by William S. Burroughs

Norman Mailer thinks William Burroughs is a genius, which I think is ludicrous beyond words. I don't think William Burroughs has an ounce of…

— Truman Capote

Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift.

— Jack Kerouac

“Read together, these two completed narratives constitute the saga of an exemplary twentieth-century American unsentimental education, in which the generosity of Billy Burroughs’s spirit…

— William S. Burroughs Jr

Burroughs called his greatest novel 'Naked Lunch,' by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth.…

— J. G. Ballard

Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.

— Joan Didion

I go back to read 'Tarzan' books every now and again or 'John Carter,' and you realize Edgar Rice Burroughs is not a great…

— Shane Black

“Don't let society's defined genre hold you down, be a free spirit and just write, let society be the one to decide where each…

— Uma Nnenna

Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift. . . . The net result of Naked Lunch will be to make people shudder…

— Jack Kerouac

I tell this anecdote with tongue in cheek at the start of my book William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, but my academic…

— Oliver Harris

In 1911, Edgar Rice Burroughs, having failed at everything else, decided to write a novel. He was then in his mid-thirties, married with two…

— Michael Dirda

“He had started out the way nearly all writers do, and I'd seen it a hundred times--amateurs transformed into gibbering wrecks by actually being…

— Colin Bateman

As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson…

— Joe R. Lansdale