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.”

“She wore red lipstick the next time that I saw her, though her hair was more voluminous with dirt than before. Owing, like everything else about these girls, to the fertility of rats.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“You know I've had work banned.”

“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.”

“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.”