Quotes from Chris Kraus

But intersubjectivity in the text occurs through intertextuality, when distinctions between original and citation become blurred.

If art's a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become the subject too.

Belief is a technology for softening the landscape. The world becomes more beautiful when God is in it.

continually exposing myself to whatever situation occurs… Gambling as well as gamboling… To exist instead of being an existentialist, to make objects instead of being one

Passion becomes tenderness, tenderness turns soft. Sex collapses into a warm intimacy. We could spend months without, and whenever we did it became short and interrupted

We've met a few times and I've felt a lot of sympathy towards you and a desire to be closer... I had a feeling that somehow I knew you and we could just be what we are together.

I felt like Frederic Moreau arriving late and uninvited at Monsieur Dambreuse's elite salon in Flaubert's Sentimental Education—a

I like to dip into other people's books, to catch the rhythm of their thinking, as I try to write my own. (...) It's better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill—getting larger 'cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.

how to escape predetermination, the mechanical sign of the meal... is not an evasion of a social-gender role; it's not regression. It is an active stance: the rejection of the cynicism that this culture hands us through its food, the creation of an involuted body.

As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active.

If you're prepared to do something anyway it doesn't matter if you're afraid.

I have long since resolved to be a Jew ... I regard that as more important than my art," R.B. Kitaj and Arnold Schoenberg declared. Hannah Wilke said: "Feminism in a larger sense is intrinsically more important to me than art." No one over called these men bad Jews.

I have long since resolved to be a Jew ... I regard that as more important than my art," R.B. Kitaj and Arnold Schoenberg declared. Hannah Wilke said: "Feminism in a larger sense is intrinsically more important to me than art." No one ever called these men bad Jews.

Somehow this redneck town allows the possibility of a middle-aged New York City woman bouncing round a house alone more generously than Woodstock or East Hampton. It's a community of exiles anyway. No one asks me any questions 'cause there's no frame of reference to put the answers in.

Wasn't modernism's greatest coup to destroy the notion of progression? And yet it still comes back in history books, in dialectical materialism, in the New Age's recycled Confucianism--the hope that all of us are travelling through concentric rings of knowledge towards some greater truth. And beneath that hope, the biggest lie: that things are getting better. Portentousness is only retrospective.

The Ramones give Needles & Pins the possibility of irony, but the irony doesn't undercut the song's emotion, it makes it stronger and more true.

Dear Dick, I guess it's been a case of infatuation... Mostly this infatuation-energy is about wanting to know someone. ... Whereas the sex-infatuations that's male *you, Shake, the priest) leap out of nowhere, based on not knowing them at all. As if sex could provide the missing clues. Can it? In the cases of the males it's like I felt some kind of hint of who that person was floating under the surface. Wanting sex to realise things I knew.

S: But Chris, I think his embarrassment isn't in relation to you or me but to himself. What can he do? C: I hate being thrown into such a physical state. S: Isn't that experiencing life to the hilt? C: No, it's just a dumb infatuation. I'm so ashamed. S: But even if his silence hurts you, isn't that what attracted you to him? The fact that he was inaccessible. So, I think there is a contradiction there, at least nothing to feel ashamed of -.

We put you to the test; we failed.

Study's good, because it microcosms everything—if you understand everything within the walls of what you study you can identify other walls too, other areas of study. Everything's separate and discrete and there is no macrocosm, really. When there are no walls there is no study, only chaos. And so you break it down.

Está lo raro y lo raro imposible. Lo raro imposible es más interesante.

Dear Dick, I'm not sure I still want to fuck you. At least, not in the same way. Sylvère keeps talking about us disturbing your "fragility", but I'm not sure that I agree. There's nothing so remarkable in one more woman adoring you. It's a "problem" you're confronting all the time. I'm just a particularly annoying one, one who refuses to behave... And yet I feel this tenderness towards you, after all we've been through.

Art supercedes what's personal.

It occurred to me that I was suffering from the dizziness of contradictions: the only pleasure that remains once you've decided you know better than the world. Accepting contradictions means not believing any more in the primacy of "true feeling." Everything is true and simultaneously. It's why I hate Sam Shepard and all your True West stuff - it's like analysis, as if the riddle could be solved by digging up the buried child.