“INTENSE SEXUAL DESIRE IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD”
― Kathy Acker, New York City in 1979, 1981

 

“I remember when I was very young I lost my virginity. I knew next to nothing about sex, but I did know that I had done something ‘bad’, so I never let anyone know I fucked. I always wondered if I was a whore until I read Madame Bovary and it was like Flaubert said. It was OK to fuck.”
― Kathy Acker, VACATION Magazine, Temporary Insanity, Spring Edition 1981

 

“I think really good pornography is rhythm. It’s not images at all. I’m talking about writing now. Pornography is a very specific or disciplined form of writing where every word has to react to the words next to it. It’s like controlling someone’s breathing or rate of experience around climax. To me it’s almost writing about writing.”
― Kathy Acker, VACATION Magazine, Temporary Insanity, Spring Edition 1981

 

“Writing can be just like acting, where you have this freedom to portray different characters.”
― Kathy Acker, VACATION Magazine, Temporary Insanity, Spring Edition 1981

 

“Out of the agony of the author’s disenchantment of plagiarism, appears beauty; given text is laid on given text language is no longer used to control but to be; the reader touches the language rather than is controlled by it; meaning changes to tapestry.”
― Kathy Acker, Great Expectations, 1983

 

On Alexander Trocchi: "He's my favorite pornographer. He's a good writer. Not that there's a difference... His books are wonderful."
― Kathy Acker, East Village Eye, Vol. 3 No. 22, June 1982

 

“I connect with Burroughs, but I have trouble reading his novels because they're so male. I love him formally”
― Kathy Acker, East Village Eye, Vol. 3 No. 22, June 1982

 

“Great Expectations is all about my mother, she committed suicide about two years ago. Great Expectations was like saying goodbye to her.”
― Kathy Acker, East Village Eye, Vol. 3 No. 22, June 1982

 

“You live in society. You're a prostitute.”
― Kathy Acker, East Village Eye, Vol. 3 No. 22, June 1982

 

“Money is not like this thing, it's like a relationship, that's used to control us.”
― Kathy Acker, East Village Eye, Vol. 3 No. 22, June 1982

 

“I don't like middle of the road.”
― Kathy Acker, East Village Eye, Vol. 3 No. 22, June 1982

 

“I Like sex”
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984

 

“I’m into sexual writing. It’s a pleasure and I get off on it.”
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984

 

“Street fashion is where the art is for poor people. I can’t afford to buy a painting so if I get some money I go buy a dress.”
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984

 

“It is easier for me to talk about my work in art terms than writing terms.”
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984

 

“I couldn’t care less about content.”
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984

 

“It’s playing with representation, playing with reality, questioning and exploding things.”
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984

 

“The stories have all been told before.”
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984

 

“Guerrilla tactics – you have to be constantly changing language, changing tactics, a constant state of flux destroying any centralisation or whatever the system is.”
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984

 

“I’m reacting against the old liberal politics of right and wrong. I really hate liberalism. Left wing or right wing it’s just the same goddamn thing. It’s two sides of the same coin and the same language.”
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984

 

You can’t have a new language in a sick society.”
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984

 

“I like pornography.”
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984

 

“I don’t like any writing that is manipulative.”
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984

 

“You have to make a difference between sexual writing and writing that is used to manipulate sexual desire.”
― Kathy Acker, The Face, #45, January 1984

 

“IF THERE IS A GOD, GOD IS DISJUNCTION AND MADNESS.”
― Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School, 1984

 

“Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you're someone else.”
― Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School, 1984

 

“Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.”
― Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School, 1984

 

“Let me put it another way. Most people are what they sense and if all you see day after day is a mat on a floor that belongs to the rats and four walls with tiny piles of plaster at the bottom, and all you eat is starch, and all you hear is continuous music, you smell garbage and piss which drips through the walls continually, and all the people you know live like you, it's not horrible, it's just... Who they are.”
― Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School, 1984

 

“I just wanna write what’s been written.”
― Kathy Acker, Blitz #18, February 1984

 

“I don’t have a point of view.”
― Kathy Acker, Blitz #18, February 1984

 

“…when you see the world from a sexual angle you are really seeing it – you’re seeing a kind of truth that only slaves see.”
― Kathy Acker, Blitz #18, February 1984

 

“I like writing sexually. It’s very pleasurable for me to do.”
― Kathy Acker, Blitz #18, February 1984

 

“She conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love.”
― Kathy Acker, Don Quixote, 1986

 

“Massochism is now rebellion.”
― Kathy Acker, Don Quixote, 1986

 

“Style in writing is always a political matter.”
― Kathy Acker, City Limits, #250, 17-24 July1986

 

“The novel is a dead form only in a society in which novels are academic and upper-middle class exercises.”
― Kathy Acker, City Limits, #250, 17-24 July 1986

 

“I think my ‘Don Quixote’ is in the same tradition as the first ‘Don Quixote’.”
― Kathy Acker, New York Times Book Review, 30 November 1986

 

“People will have to grapple with all sorts of difficult problems, leaving us no time for the luxury of expressing ourselves artitstically.”
― Kathy Acker, New York Times Book Review, 30 November 1986

 

“I write by using other written texts, rather than expressing ‘reality’.”
― Kathy Acker, New York Times Book Review, 30 November 1986

 

“Novels should be aimed at adding to the cultural discourse.”
― Kathy Acker, New York Times Book Review, 30 November 1986

 

“If language is to be a tool for our freeing, it must be that language which gives us pleasure.”
― Kathy Acker, City Limits, #299, 23 June – 2 July 1987

 

“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.”
― Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless, 1988

 

Ten years ago, it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy language that normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning.
― Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless,1988

 

What is the language of the 'unconcious'? (If this ideal unconscious or freedom doesn't exist: simply pretend that it does, use fiction, for the sake of survival, for all of our survival.) Its primary language must be taboo, all that is forbidden.”
― Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless,1988

 

“What I do is write in sections, and then the sections come together. I do that because I’ve always earned my living by performing, so I do the sections as performances. I start off with a problem or a question and I look for material about the problem, and in a way one thing leads to another and becomes a sort of voyage.”
― Kathy Acker, interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

 

“My writing’s not a product, it’s a process.”
― Kathy Acker, interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

 

“To me, the supreme writer of rationality is De Sade.”
― Kathy Acker, interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

 

“I don’t write from a blank page.”
― Kathy Acker, interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

 

“I was taught that you start being a real writer when you find your own voice, and I noticed at rather a young age that I had great difficulty finding my own voice.”
― Kathy Acker, interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

 

“identity doesn’t exist in the way that we think it does… identity isn’t centred.”
― Kathy Acker, interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

 

“Saying I denigrate the original texts is thinking in very traditional English terms of good and bad literature. This business about culture - good literature; great culture - is very much a political con.”
― Kathy Acker, interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

 

“books are like a laboratory for me”
― Kathy Acker, interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

 

“Empire is not a cosy book, it’s not something where you can identify with the story. With most books what you do is fantasize. You know: “I’m the hero. I’m the heroine.” How could you do that with my books? Who would you become? "You could only become the questioner, the searcher, and that takes a lot of effort.”
― Kathy Acker, interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

 

“All language is a story. What we do is tell one another stories, we don’t tell one another the truth. There’s no such thing.”
― Kathy Acker, interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

 

“liberals are usually right-wingers in disguise, and we should know the right-wing when we meet it”
― Kathy Acker, interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

 

“the whole dualistic theory has to be gotten rid of. As long as we’re politically acting dualistically we’re just engendering the same society”
― Kathy Acker, interviewed by Stan Nichols, Interzone, #27, Jan/Feb 1988

 

“I wanted to stick a knife, a little one, up the ass of the novel,”
― Kathy Acker, introduction to Young Lust,1988

 

“As is often true in American literature, political concerns only emerge through personal statements.”
― Kathy Acker, Elle, April 1989

 

On de Sade: “I think he’s a feminist. He takes male-chauvinism and shoves it up against the wall – no hearts and flowers at all.”
Sodom! City Limits #414, 7-14 September 1989

 

On The 120 days of Sodom: “I vomited when I read it; I’ve never had such a physical reaction to a book.”
Sodom! City Limits #414, 7-14 September 1989

 

“‘The 120 days’ is like a fairy tale”
Sodom! City Limits #414, 7-14 September 1989

 

On The 120 days of Sodom: “It makes you think how safe our literature is now.”
Sodom! City Limits #414, 7-14 September 1989

 

What do I care about all that average shit that has nothing to do with adventure?”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity, 1990

 

“In the early days, I was never paid by Grove Press, well I was paid, sort of, but I did have an understanding with them where I could come in and take all their pornography.”
― Kathy Acker, on Bookworm, 31 August 1992

 

“Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology, 1993

 

“The strongest change – and the most nonviolent change – I’ve seen in communities, and I'm not talking about technological change now, is the feminist revolution. Things have just altered totally since I was five or six years old and the world I began to grow up in.”
― Kathy Acker, Interview, Brisbane, 27 July 1995, Art, Performance, Media: 31 Interviews, edited by Nicholas Zurbrugg

 

“Humanism is over”
― Kathy Acker, Interview, Brisbane, 27 July 1995, Art, Performance, Media: 31 Interviews, edited by Nicholas Zurbrugg

 

“…one reason why a writer like William Burroughs is so important is that his models, his characters, the uses he makes of identity, are not based on psychology.
― Kathy Acker, Interview, Brisbane, 27 July 1995, Art, Performance, Media: 31 Interviews, edited by Nicholas Zurbrugg

 

“I didn’t really feel comfortable in the world until punk came along.”
― Kathy Acker, Interview and reading at SUNY-Buffalo, 4 Plus Series, 12 April 1995

 

“I don’t have a style.”
― Kathy Acker, Interview and reading at SUNY-Buffalo, 4 Plus Series, 12 April 1995

 

“Anti-Oedipus was basically my bible for a number of years”
― Kathy Acker, Interview and reading at SUNY-Buffalo, 4 Plus Series, 12 April 1995

 

“I don’t think we live all one life, I think we all live lots of lives.”
― Kathy Acker, Interview and reading at SUNY-Buffalo, 4 Plus Series, 12 April 1995

 

“My mind is a garbage can.”
― Kathy Acker, Interview and reading at SUNY-Buffalo, 4 Plus Series, 12 April 1995

 

I’ll appropriate any text I can get my hands on.
― Kathy Acker, Interview and reading at SUNY-Buffalo, 4 Plus Series, 12 April 1995

 

“If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.” 
― Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates, 1996

 

“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.”
― Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates, 1996

 

“There are times when the law jeopardizes those who obey it.”
― Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates, 1996

 

“There is no master narrative nor realist perspective to provide a background of social and historical facts.”
― Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates,1996

 

“Every time you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.”
― Kathy Acker, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia, 1996

 

“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.”
― Kathy Acker, Bodies of Work: Essays, 1997

 

“I find waiting unbearable because it makes me passive and negates me. I hate being nothing.”
― Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld, 1997

 

“If we keep on fucking, I'm not gonna die.”
― Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld, 1997

 

“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.”
― Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld, 1997

 

“Eurydice sits alone on a red bed. She has flaming red hair, so flaming that you can't see anything else of her, much less anything else around her.”
― Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld, 1997

 

“She lives in her own world because she makes the whole world hers.”
― Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld, 1997

 

“If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character of the woman who's loved is described or matters.”
― Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld, 1997