"One day...while cutting a mount for a drawing, Brion Gysin [an artist friend] sliced though a pile of newspapers with his Stanley blade, and made a mosaic out of the strips of newspapers, because it looked visually interesting. Then when he read it he thought it was hilarious. When Burroughs got back from lunch, Brion said, 'By the way, look at this.' Brion thought it was just an amusing accident, in the line of the old Surrealist games. But for Burroughs, who was looking for ways to escape from antiquated concepts of the novel, from the nineteenth-century stucture of moving characters around within a plot, Gysin's cut-up newspapers switched on the electric light bulb over the cartoon character's head.
To Burroughs, the cut-up introduced an element of randomness and an element of time. Instead of writing being like a still life, writing with the use of cut-ups was like walking around the block. It made explicit a simple sensory process that was going on all the time anyway--which is that when you're reading a newspaper, say, you're reading one column but you see the other columns as well, and the bus you're on and the person sitting next to you. There was a juxtaposition of what you were doing and what was happening around you. What the cut-up method did was to incorporate that juxtaposition." (Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988, p. 321.)

Burroughs cut ups were the subject of debated praise and insult for respected artists and literary figures at the time.

In a letter to New York poet Ted Berrigan, Burroughs said, "'to me the most interesting aspect of the cut-ups is that it introduces the unexpected into writing.'" (Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988, p. 403.) And yet, at the same time, it is simply how we, as humans, think and live, the "simple sensory process" that Burroughs felt the cut-ups made explicit.