Kathy Acker Quotes

I didn't start to work until I realized what it was I had to offer. I stopped imitating performers I admired and started just being myself.

All that I am is me. So I'm not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist; I'm me, and these are things that I do.

Yeah, it's nice to look up to people, but the more you try to be somebody else, the less you are of yourself.

Training readers to expect a voice or subject matter from me would interfere with the reinvention I crave. At the same time, I feel almost too able to disappear at times.

One thing I've learned is that the best thing a producer can do is help you be you.

Be stupid, be dumb, be funny, if that's who you are. Don't try to be someone that society wants you to be; that's stupid. So be yourself.

You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.

Write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.

If you keep changing for every person who tells you to, then who's going to be left? Why get the success and be somebody else?

I’m not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn. I outgrow it, I change it.

I have in my life concentrated more on self-expression than self-denial.

You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it

Boys, you must strive to find your own voice, because the longer you wait to begin the less likely you are to find it at all.

The worst thing you can do is say to yourself, "I want to be just like somebody else." You have to absorb knowledge from someone else, but ultimately you have to find your own voice.

The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.

Whatever coast he's on, a man should be himself. I don't write in any particular idiom, I write Charles Mingus.

What is originality? It is being one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are.

Every act is an act of self definition.

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents only one of a thousand attitudes. You must find your own. If someone else could have done something as well as you, don’t do it. If someone else could have said something as well as you, don’t say it—or written something as well as you, don’t write it. Grow fond only of that which you can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or patiently, ah! that most irreplaceable of beings.

Fundamentally, you can never be someone else. You can only be less of who you are.