Quotes from Kathy Acker

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. She takes up too much space. Also she's mad. Which has nothing to do with anything. She lives in her own world because she makes the whole world hers.

It's possible to name everything and to destroy the world.

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.

What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

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.

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

Writing is one method of dealing with being human or wanting to suicide cause in order to write you kill yourself at the same time while remaining alive.

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 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.

I need anything, anything that will stop me from living in the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.

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

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

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.

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.

You know I've had work banned.

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

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

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.

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

I'm very staid compared to my students, actually.