Kathy Acker
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.Collection: Dreams
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 write it to get it out of me. I don't write it to remember it.
Traveling around I don't think people are that horrible, I think they just don't know.
I wasn't really into body piercings until I found that about half my female students had them.
But I still don't have a clear idea of what my voice is.
And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation.
And internalization is used in this country as a very effective political tool.
But guys such as Allen and William are more supportive than most men.
First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.
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 mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it.
I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?
I think it's really important to find out why people hurt you or try to oppose you or whatever.
I think the best thing in cases of censorship or things like this is to get as much media as possible.
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.
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.
I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.
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.
I'm very staid compared to my students, actually.
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.
One of the reasons I think the ultra right-wing has such power in this country is that no one talks out.
Some of the stuff about Yogi energy is really fascinating.
That's what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing.
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.
There's a backlash against womyn that's really bad right now.
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.
We've been very bad at understanding why the right-wing does things.
Well, fear and homophobia are both pervasive.
Yeah, I mean, I put work out there for people to use and I'm grateful when you use it.
You can do whatever you want with my work.
You know I've had work banned.
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.Collection: Women
The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.Collection: Unbearable
GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.Collection: Mind
If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.Collection: Want
i am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed.Collection: Limitless
Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Home
The whole world is men's bloody fantasies.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Dream
There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn't bother to read itCollection: Book
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.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Desire
There are times when the law jeopardizes those who obey it.Collection: Law
All memory can do is scream for touch.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Real
A novel is a book with a lot of pages.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Order