Home > Author > Chris Kraus
81 " Cuando vives con tanta intensidad en la cabeza, al final no hay diferencia entre lo que imaginas y lo que ocurre de veras. "
― Chris Kraus , I Love Dick
82 " The more I get into it the more isolated I feel vis-à-vis the writers whom I consider to be of any serious mind... I am enclosing this article entitled New Heroes by Simone de Beauvoir...It is what I have been thinking at the bottom of my mind all this time and God knows it is difficult to write the way I do and yet think their way. This problem you will never have to face because you have always been a truly isolated person so that whatever you write will be good because it will be true which is not so in my case... You immediately receive recognition because what you write is in true relation to yourself which is always recognizable to the world outside... With me who knows? When you are capable only of a serious approach to writing as I am it is almost more than one can bear to be continually doubting one's sincerity... (citing Jane Bowles, 1947) "
83 " How could I make you understand the letters were the realest thing I’d ever done? By calling it a game you were negating all my feelings. Even if this love for you could never be returned I wanted recognition. And so I started ranting on about Guatemala. The femme seduction trip seemed so corrupt and I was clueless how to do it. The only way I knew of reaching you apart from fucking was through ideas and words. "
84 " If wisdom's silence then it's time to play the fool. "
85 " But intersubjectivity in the text occurs through intertextuality, when distinctions between original and citation become blurred. "
86 " Fuck her once, she’ll write a book about it "
― Chris Kraus
87 " Belief is a technology for softening the landscape. The world becomes more beautiful when God is in it. "
― Chris Kraus , Aliens & Anorexia
88 " Why should women settle to think and talk about just femaleness when men were constantly transcending gender? "
89 " 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 "
90 " 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 "
91 " Two hours ago I took a break from writing this to take a walk before the sun went down. I had an urge to play Willie Nelson's "Crazy" on the Red Hot Country CD before going out, but didn't. When I turned the bend on 49th Terrace, my usual walk, Crazy sung by Patsy Cline was pouring, I mean POURING, out the windows of a house. I leaned back against a fence across the street and watched the house lift off. An operatic, cinematic moment, everything locked into a single frame that gets you high. Like You I'm Trapped. "
92 " I felt like Frederic Moreau arriving late and uninvited at Monsieur Dambreuse’s elite salon in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education—a "
93 " 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. "
94 " 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. "
95 " If you're prepared to do something anyway it doesn't matter if you're afraid. "
96 " 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. "
97 " 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. "
98 " 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. "
99 " 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. "
100 " Back to the 1st Person: I'd even made up art theories about my inability to use it. That I'd chosen film and theater, two artforms built entirely on collisions, that only reach their meanings through collision, because I couldn't ever believe in the integrity/supremacy of the 1st Person (my own). That in order to write 1st Person narrative there needs to be a fixed self or persona and by refusing to believe in this I was merging with the fragmented reality of the time. But now I think okay, that's right, there's no fixed point of self but it exists & by writing you can somehow chart that movement. That maybe 1st Person writing's just as fragmentary as more a-personal collage, it's just more serious: bringing change & fragmentation closer, bringing it down to where you really are. "