Kathy Acker quotes:

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

I'm looking for what might be called a body language. One thing I do is stick a vibrator up my cunt and start writing -- writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language and seeing what that's like."

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

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.

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

You know I've had work banned.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'm very staid compared to my students, actually.

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

[] A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced.

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

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."

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 I'm not so censored when I use dream material.

That's what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing.

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

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.

...'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...

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

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

All memory can do is scream for touch.

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

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.

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

Culture is that which falsifies.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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'm what happens after death, which is writing.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Some of the stuff about Yogi energy is really fascinating.

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

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

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

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

The whole world is men's bloody fantasies.

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

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.

Well, fear and homophobia are both pervasive.

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

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.

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

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.

Photo © Michel Delsol