Kathy Acker
I'm looking for what might be called a body
language. One thing I do is stick a vibrator up my cunt and start
writing -- writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of
the language and seeing what that's like.
Mark
Amerika
I think what differentiates Avant-Pop writing
from avant-garde or early postmodernism is that the emerging
practitioners of this writing style are more comfortable with the
digital culture they find themselves absorbed in. Our ability to
process information is becoming an art in and of itself.
Martin Amis
I looked down the bar and there were ten
people, and eight to nine of them had my book in front of them.
They were chatting and having drinks. I thought "This is the
way the world is supposed to be."
Don Bajema
One of my biggest fears is to somehow be
asked later "why I sat around while the cattlecars were
unloading at Dachau." I feel like a dupe. I feel like I am
part of the most evil form of government since nazi Germany. This
is what causes me to write.
Nicholson
Baker
The genesis of the book was an idea I had in
4th grade, very much like the one described in the book. I had
this idea that I wanted to switch time off and look really
closely at the chalkboard. And then I thought that I could
incidentally take the teacher's clothes off.
Bruce
Benderson
I'm a middle class person encountering the
world of the street. But the more you enter that world, the less
likely it is that you'll be writing, because that's the world of
drugs, sex, constant change and criminal activity.
Rex Bruce
A lot of artists using non-digital media get
paranoid when I talk to them that computers are taking over. This
is bad 70's sci-fi. Artists are so paranoid or are such rah-rahs
about their particular pursuit or style. It's so neurotic. What a
bore.
Dennis
Cooper
[My books] acknowledge [the erotic side of
evil]. I try to show stuff. Allow it to be erotic, real scary.
Allow it to be moving, all these different things, so it's not
just presented as titillating or disgusting because that's the
way it's usually presented.
Douglas
Coupland
The 90s are becoming this enormous battle. If
there's anything that defines this decade, it is the battle for
staying and keeping yourself relevant.
Kathryn
Cramer
The anarchist Kathryn (the one who writes the
stuff)... (yup) wants very heavily linked hypertext, not to
liberate you, but to liberate me.
Rikki
Ducornet
If I "belong" with the Post Modern
tribe perhaps it is because I am so taken up with the idea of
fiction as an infinite process of mind and fascinated with the
idea of mind as a process of fiction. Perhaps this is why I write
about madmen so much.
Bret
Easton Ellis
I don't know what other reference points
there were when I was growing up. It was books, movies, TV and
rock and roll.
Eurudice
In writing as in sex, there's a certain
undressing and unselfconsciousness: a certain loss of identity in
a union with the world at large which is the divine. I feel like
when I write that I don't know who I am the same way when I fuck
I don't know who I am.
Raymond
Federman
But I know that first hand, the girls F has
known intimately in Germany have all told him that they think he
is a great writer. That reading his books is like fucking with
him. I am quoting here.
Mary
Gaitskill
I see form as being a by-product. What I mean
is that the style will be the inevitable result of what the
writer is pursuing and how she's pursuing it.
Spalding Gray
I only see through loss, death and my right eye (my
left eye is very impaired).
Richard
Grossman
Writing is a ritual or cleansing activity: it is the
most potent ritual that we have, and the staleness and inanition
of the world culture, and its lack of perceptive writing,
endanger our survival. A culture without proper ritual will
certainly self-destruct.
Stewart
Home
I don't write autobiography, but I know that
people will read my books as autobiography. So I lay red
herrings, so they get a fucked up idea of what I'm really like.
Hypertext
Forum (with Jay Bolter, Jane Yellowlees Douglas, Jim Rosenberg
and others)
I think there's room, within the new genres
made possible by digital technology, for what we'd consider
"pop" as well as what we'd consider "avant
garde." Put more simply, not every hypertext narrative is
going to end up being as challenging as Ulysses.
Paul
Krassner
The quality of co-option is not strained.
Controversy has become a commodity.
George
Landow
The theory and the medium are on the same
wavelength; that is, there is a real convergence, even if it is
not a total mapping of all theory to all technology. But
hypermedia certainly is very useful in embodying the theory just
like the theory is very useful in intellectualizing and
explaining the space.
Jonathan
Lethem
All the disasters in Amnesia Moon are
traceable to neurosis. Maybe if I wasn't so sexually frustrated
when I was fourteen I might not have needed to see the world laid
to rubble so often.
Mark Leyner
No matter how wacky or silly what I'm talking
about is, I try to make a very elegant sentence about it. I just
have a very personal affinity for elegance.
Geert
Lovink
It's possible to be on-line without a
computer--with the imagination, with drugs; this is not a
hardware question. Finally it all boils down to exciting the
senses.
Cris Mazza
I believe that the fine line between truth
and perception may not exist, and perception is the only truth.
I'm not really a philosopher either, so going much further will
expose me as a poseur.
Larry
McCaffery
The key here is recognizing that pop
culture's not the enemy. Pop culture is now the dream imagery
writers use, it's a landscape they can tap into and fuck around
with.
Ted Mooney
I am certain that I will always, undoubtedly,
write about strong women. If I am going to spend five or six
hours a day with my characters, I want to be quite fond of them.
Colin
Newman & Malka Spigel
Historically we see the primacy of the
narrative song being eroded by plurality of version. It's hardly
an issue now virtually no-one I know listens to songs any more.
Jeff Noon
I personally see Vurt as a transitional
novel, between cyberpunk and something else--I don't know what it
is yet. One of the things about Vurt is there's no technology in
it. It's organic--it's almost like magic.
Marcos
Novak
The world itself, as far as I know, is the
result of innumerable algorithmic processes, richly interwoven.
Sadie Plant
Yeah, I do think that Britain, much as I
spend most of my time hating it, I do increasingly think that it
is quite an interesting place to be.
Postfeminist
Forum (with Kiki Smith, Deb Margolin, Ann Hamilton, Guerrilla
Girls, and others)
Rather than having a purpose for a piece from the
beginning, or an agenda, I look at my art as an experiment and
wait to see how a piece will reveal itself afterwards, so it's
less a pragmatic exercise in propaganda. (Kiki Smith)
Doug Rice
I guess you could say that I have been trying to
cure my body through a plunge into language ever since I was a
young boy/girl.
Avital
Ronell
To get off any drug, or anything which has
been invested as an ideal object -- something that you want to
incorporate as part of you -- precipitates a major narcissistic
crisis.
Steven
Shaviro
Revulsion and excitement are emotions that
are in fact quite close to one another, which is why books,
movies, etc trafficking in sex and and/or violence are both the
most popular ones, and the ones most frequently subject to
censure and taboo.
John
Shirley
I think the worst people in the world are
drug addicts, and the best people in the world are ex-drug
addicts.
Leslie Marmon
Silko
You can look at the old stories that were
told among the tribal people here in a north country and see that
within them is the same kind of valuable lessons about human
behavior and that we need them still.
Christopher
Sorrentino
I'll dump verisimilitude and factual accuracy
for fiction every time, and so in this case the idea of
articulating some kind of reasoned "judgment" about
rock and roll went out the window right away: I started from the
premise that it's another pile of shit from the Lite
Entertainment brigade and went on from there.
Gilbert
Sorrentino
While it's all right to think of something as
delicious as Dallas or Dynasty as, well, delicious, it's not a
good idea to confuse them with Jean Genet. Essentially, the
novelist, the serious novelist, should do what he can do and
simply forgo the idea of a substantial audience.
Terry
Southern
In the very beginning, I wrote a short story about a
girl in Greenwich Village who got involved with a hunchback
because she was such a good Samaritan.
Ron Sukenick
Hyperfiction is the scraps from the table of
the culture feast that you bring home in your avant-pop DOGGY
BAG.
Gregory
Ulmer
The task for intellectuals now is similar to
the one undertaken at the beginning of the modern age--to take
the new vulgate (world popular culture emerging in electronic
media) and forge it into a discourse capable of supporting and
extending the fullest powers of intelligence, both personal and
collective.
The Veterans
To use the CD-ROM for artistic purposes was
the goal we all had in common and that brought us finally
together.
William
T. Vollmann
Why I'm interested in prostitutes is because
they have everything interesting in life all together: there's
love, sex, and money. What more do you want?
Ania Walwicz
When I actually deliver my work I do become
an actor, or a singer, that sort of diva position through using
the cadences of my voice.
Curtis
White
Let's face it. Corporations have won. The
odds are hopeless. We're just keeping ideas alive, and a few
literal and conceptual autonomous zones active.
Paul
Williams
You have to be independent from the music
business system when you want to write about the art.
Stephen
Wright
[Art] is about as outrageous and murderous an
act a person can do short of really doing one physically.
