Kathy Acker Quotes

We don't have a clue what it is to be male or female, or if there are intermediate genders. Male and female might be fields which overlap into androgyny or different kinds of sexual desires. But because we live in a Western, patriarchal world, we have very little chance of exploring these gender possibilities.

I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.

Even a woman who has the soul of a pirate, at least pirate morals, even a woman who prefer loneliness to the bickerings and constraints of heterosexual marriage, even such a woman who is a freak in our society needs a home... The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don't fit in.

GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.

If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.

There's a point at which when I start to know a man well--this isn't true of women--I wonder whether there's something in him that's evil. Something that's pure and can't be touched. This quality of evil may be related to the quality of artistry, for an artist has the same characteristics.

We get on the bandwagon in all sorts of ways - you know minor ways and major ways - like what you've just encountered which isn't censorship exactly, it was something sort of uglier in a way.

Well, I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing.

There are times when the law jeopardizes those who obey it.

But : We're still human. Human because we keep on battling against all these horrors, the horrors caused and not caused by us. We battle not in order to stay alive, that would be too materalistic, for we are body and spirit, but in order to love each other.

I wasn't really into body piercings until I found that about half my female students had them.

My nutritionist read my pathology report and said, "There's only one way you can beat your cancer." "What's that?" "You have to find out what caused it.

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language.

Every one-night-stand or man in a one-night-stand is like every other one-night-stand or man in a one-night-stand because the sex in a one-night-stand is without time and only time allows value.

We come crawling through these cracks, orphans, lobotomies; if you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything. Whole rotten world come down and break. Let me spread my legs.

I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.

Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.

The whole world is men's bloody fantasies.

'cause humans, above all, fear intelligence. how humans, scared out of their minds, gather whatever intelligence they can put their hands on and put it all in a central penitentiary named facts.

But now that she had achieved knighthood, and thought and acted as she wanted and decided, for one has to act in this way in order to save this world, she neither noticed nor cared that all the people around her thought she was insane.

I'm very staid compared to my students, actually.

I find waiting unbearable because it makes me passive and negates me. I hate being nothing.

The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility.

Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you're someone else.

All memory can do is scream for touch.

I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.

I think the best thing in cases of censorship or things like this is to get as much media as possible.

There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn't bother to read it

One of the most destructive forces in the world is love. For the following reason: The world is a conglomeration of objects, no, of events and the approachings of events towards objects, therefore of becoming stases static stagnant, of all that is unreal. You get in the world, you get your daily life your routine doesn’t matter if you’re rich poor legal illegal, you begin to believe what doesn’t change is real, and love comes along and shows all these unchangeable for ever fixtures to be flimsy paper bits. Love can tear anything to shreds.

You create identity, you're not given identity per se. What became more and more interesting to me wasn't the I, it was text because it's text that create identity. That's how I got interested in plagiarism.

I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent.

Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut away dullness, lobotomy, buzzing, belief in human beings, stagnancy, images, and accumulation. As soon as we stop believing in human beings, rather know we are dogs and trees, we'll start to be happy.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

I think it's really important to find out why people hurt you or try to oppose you or whatever.

Those who are driven by poverty, those who're free from material worries hunger exhausting labor a joyless existence ask the same question, the question of meaning.

Writing must be a machine for breaking down, that is, allowing the now uncontrolled and uncontrollable reconstitutions of thoughts and expressions. All other kinds of writing simply express.

Some of the stuff about Yogi energy is really fascinating.

LESBIANS are women who prefer their own ways to male ways.LESBIANS prefer the convoluting halls of sensuality to direct goal-pursuing mores. LESBIANS have made a small world deep within and separated from the world.What has usually been called the world is the male world.

A language is the appearances of connections therefore language as in writing doesn't express anything: it creates.

And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation.

You know I've had work banned.

Culture is that which falsifies.

The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.

It's all up to you, girls. You have to be strong. These are the days of post-women's liberation. You have grown up by now and you have to take care of yourself. No one's going to help you.

On the surface we all act like we all love each other and we're free and easy, and actually we're far more moralistic than any other society I've ever lived in.

Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.