Kathy Acker Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

All memory can do is scream for touch.

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

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

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.

Some of the stuff about Yogi energy is really fascinating.

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.

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

You know I've had work banned.

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.

Culture is that which falsifies.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Well, fear and homophobia are both pervasive.

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