William S. Burroughs Quotes

I was a painter before I was a writer, so I was always a visual artist. And my writing, to me, was always visual.

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

I don't want to write, I'd rather draw.

To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

I always try hard to arrange all media in a way so that it expresses what I want - this is not limited to one medium alone and varies from case to case.

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.

I just say I'm an artist who works with pictures and words.

Comics, in a sense, the style, the images - it's almost like music. They say music is a universal language, but when the eyes behold something, a figure, somebody moving; it's real, and it cannot be denied.

Visual storytelling is at once immediate and subversive.

I've always liked writing. Even when I was in art school and thought I was going to be a gallery painter, I liked to pair my artwork with writing. And so that naturally led to drawing comics.

In reality some images or drawings have a greater impact than many buildings that are built.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

My favourite stuff is visual, and I always want to work with visual artwork. I think it depends on the person, but for me, photographs of an image of something interesting or inspiring is worth a lot more than words to me. I think every concept I've come up with and turned into films or that will be hopefully become a film comes from images first.

There still is some opposition to it in some museums and art schools, but I think photography has really grown into a mature art form.

The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.

I'm a really visual artist, and I love writing treatments for music videos, photo shoots, fashion, and all the visual parts that go along with making an album.

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie. I say this as someone who would rather read comics than watch movies, listen to music, anything. But it's not an operatic medium. I hear other people talk about being moved to tears by comics. I can't imagine that.

Photography is full of symbolism, it's a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.