Kathy Acker Quotations

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.

I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because Im not so censored when I use dream material.

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

I think what we have in this country is a little more dangerous in a way because it can't be seen fully. It's sorta internal censorship. We censor each other.

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.

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

I write it to get it out of me. I don't write it to remember it.

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.

I mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it.

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

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

One of the reasons I think the ultra right-wing has such power in this country is that no one talks out.

Thats what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing.

There's a backlash against womyn that's really bad right now.

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

I'm really fascinated and you know I've been wondering about that usage of language, various breathing techniques and why in these practices language is being used in another way.

But guys such as Allen and William are more supportive than most men.

You can do whatever you want with my work.

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?

And internalization is used in this country as a very effective political tool.

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

Traveling around I don't think people are that horrible, I think they just don't know.

But I still don't have a clear idea of what my voice is.

I found my voice was a reaction to all that voice stuff.

I mean, once work's out there it's meant to be used.

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

Some of the stuff about Yogi energy is really fascinating.

We've been very bad at understanding why the right-wing does things.

Yeah, I mean, I put work out there for people to use and I'm grateful when you use it.

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.

The literary culture, if you examine it, the high literary culture is that which preserves the government and you know it's really the talk for those who have.

I don't think what happens in this country is censorship, I should say that. It's something else. It's not banning. It's something else.

You know I think many writers are dangerous to the establishment. I mean, they go against all the rules that you're told writing.

You know, I've been told that by some of the writers in the generation above me: You'll be able to write when you've found a voice.

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.

The more rapidly the water moves, the lighter it seems.

You can't change old people. Unlike middle-aged people, they do what they want.

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

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.

...'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...

After Hatuey, a fifteenth-century Indian insurrectionist, had been fixed to the stake, his Spanish captors extended him the choice of converting to Christianity and ascending to Heaven of going unrepentantly to Hell. Gathering that his executioners expected to go to heaven, Hatuey chose the other

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.

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.

Well, fear and homophobia are both pervasive.

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

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

i am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed.

Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum.

Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both.

Death is another bar which lies several steps below the normal world. I'm at its threshold, but not yet in it. Its doorway is doorless.

Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.

I have become interested in languages which I cannot make up, which I cannot create or even create in: I have become interested in languages which I can only come up upon (as I disappear), a pirate upon buried treasure. The dreamer, the dreaming, the dream. I call these languages, languages of the body.

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.

Culture is that which falsifies.

I'm what happens after death, which is writing.

All memory can do is scream for touch.

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.

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

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.

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.

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

It was only when we were in that bed, high above the world - then I thought the birds could have been circling around our bodies circled around each other - that we made our world totally separated from everything else. It was the only way we could be together.

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.

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

You know I've had work banned.

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

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.

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

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.

The whole world is men's bloody fantasies.

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.

Even a woman who has the soul of a pirate, at least pirate morals, even a woman who ... has constraints to heterosexual marriage, even 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.

Perhaps if human desire is said out loud, the urban planes, the prisons, the architectural mirrors will take off, as airplanes do. The black planes will take off into the night air and the night winds, sliding past and behind each other, zooming, turning and turning in the redness of the winds, living, never to return.

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.

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.

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

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

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

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.

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

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.

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

Women need to become literary criminals, break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.