Quotes

1. •"I Am the Artist when I Am Open. When I am closed I am Brion Gysin."
   

2. •"I out in the Sahara heading due south with each day of travel less sure of just who I am, where I am going or why. There must be some easier way to do it but this is the only one I know so, like a man drowning in a sea of sand, I struggle back into this body which has been given me for my trip across the Great Desert. . . Here, too, I may well lose my way for I can see that I am, whoever I am, out in the middle of nowhere when I slip back into this awakening flesh which fits me." (The Process)
   

3. •"Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters' techniques to writing; things as simple as immediate as collage or montage." ('Cut-Ups Self-Explained' in Brion Gysin Let the Mice In)
   

4. •"I enjoy inventing things out of fun. After all, life is a game, not a career."
   

5. •"I believe that no one can be sincerely interested or more than amused by anyone doing nothing in two dimensions. Nor can any but fools be interested by a lack of emotional intelligence as expressed by worn out symbols representing nothing but their own lack of intellectual adventure. Pictures are made to live with. I am made to make pictures. The magician's role." (note by Brion Gysin in 1939 Sketchbook)
   

6. •"I view life as a fortuitous collaboration ascribable to the fact that one finds oneself at the right place at the same time.”
   

7. •"The Way Is Nor This Nor That."
   

8. •"The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not chain them in phrases. Who told the poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?"
   ('Cut-Ups Self-Explained' in Brion Gysin Let the Mice In)
   

9. •"I may write only what I know in space: I am that I am."
   (Notes on Painting)
   

10. •"He covered tons of paper with his words and made them his very own words... he branded them like cattle he rustled out there on the free ranges of Literature... Used by another writer who was attempting cut-ups, one single word of Burroughs vocabulary could ruin a whole barrel of good everyday words, run the literary rot right through them. One sniff of that prose and you'd say, 'Why, that's a Burroughs." (on the prose of William S. Burroughs in Here to Go: Planet R-101, Interviews with Terry Wilson)
    

11. •"An artist who is interested in all the structural problems of sensation and who examines with great objectivity and curiosity the possibility of sensorial enrichment innate in the perceptive capacity of man. His search, in short, is parascientific; he ventures into very particular areas, not limiting himself to theoretical discussion, as the dadaists did, but going into an actual examination of the semantic links to which we entrust ourselves daily with our senses. Obsessive repetition, the upsetting of our relationships, unconventional stimuli etc., constitute the instruments that permit us to examine the novelty of the reflexes of our conscience, and therefore also the novelty of the ways that they reveal themselves." (Notes on Painting)
    

12. •"Of course the sands of Present Time are running out from under our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum: 'What are we here for?' is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. The answer to the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. Who runs may read but few people run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!" (The Process)
    

13. •"Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature the means that painters have been using for fifty years. Cut words into pieces and scramble them. You'll hear someone draw a bow-string. Who runs may read, To read better, practice your running. Speed is entirely up to us, since machines have delivered us from the horse. Henceforth the question is to deliver us from that other so-called superior animal, man. It's not worth it to chase out the merchants: their temple is dedicated to the unsuitable lie of the value of the Unique. The crime of separation gave birth to the idea of the Unique which would not be separate. In painting, matter has seen everything: from sand to stuffed goats. Disfigured more and more, the image has been geometrically multiplied to a dizzying degree. A snow of advertising could fall from the sky, and only collector babies and the chimpanzees who make abstract paintings would bother to pick one up." (Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success)