Acconci Quotes

#1. There are no guidelines for what happens when you get successful as an artist. My heroes were artists like Acconci, and he didn't make any money. That's what I thought success was.

Robert Longo

#2. By and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them

Will Durant

#3. I was always fascinated by diagramming a sentence. Because that is going into a space, going into a world of language.

Vito Acconci

#4. Writing was always a laborious thing for me. I never wrote fluently, I never wrote fluidly, there was something very awkward in my writing. But it seemed to me purposely awkward. It's almost as if I made the labor part of writing.

Vito Acconci

#5. You could walk around behind the typist and read the text, which was about hearing, and what you heard was the sound of the typewriter. Of course, this was a pre-electric typewriter, a typewriter that made noise.

Vito Acconci

#6. Warning, brave traveler - here be implementation details!

Anonymous

#7. Maybe I had to stop photographing so that I could learn to touch.

Vito Acconci

#8. Architecture is not about space but about time.

Vito Acconci

#9. If something's public then it seems like the important thing is the person in that public. And the notion of rhetoric. I went to Jesuit schools that focused on first there's grammar, then there's rhetoric, and rhetoric's usually seen as a kind of degraded method, because you're trying to persuade.

Vito Acconci

#10. When you have great working relationships with people, both collaborative and creatively, everybody will always want to work together.

Edward Kitsis

#11. There's a legal term for a problem in public space: something that might draw people to an area-say, across train tracks-where they might be caused harm. It's called a 'public nuisance.' I wouldn't mind being called that for my life's work.

Vito Acconci

#12. The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews.

Frederick Buechner

#13. [My early performance work] started by being the activity of a person, any person, like any other - but once that person became photographed it became a specialized person, the object of a personality cult.

Vito Acconci

#14. I'm using my own person in pieces, but I'm trying to turn my person into a nonperson in the sense of a person without will, without volition. I'm subjecting myself to a scheme.

Vito Acconci

#15. I made a better decision in choosing my team. Sure, I had a bigger choice of players to choose from - but I couldn't have asked for a harder working group of players who did an incredible job.

Vladimir Kramnik

#16. Even though I always claimed that I didn't want to write about something - once I wasn't writing fiction, anyway; I think for me the change from fiction to poetry was that in fiction I was writing about something, in poetry I was writing something.

Vito Acconci

#17. If tough times seem to keep you down you might as well rest in peace."

Will Robins

Will Robinson

#18. It's not the bullet that kills you, it's the hole.

Vito Acconci

#19. I just need your star for a day.

Nick Drake

#20. It's language as a kind of structural system. A diagram of a sentence, now that seems like a kind of architectural model. I don't know how to explain it, but it would be nice to try. Why, why this fascination?

Vito Acconci

#21. he was literally holding his face together.

Peter David

#22. Everyone has his own purpose of existence

Sunday Adelaja

#23. We are not condemned to remain who we are. No one can help us do this but ourselves.

Jan-Philipp Sendker

#24. [Photography was necessary to] make my place in the art-world: in order to do this, I had to make a picture, since a picture was what a gallery or museum was meant to hold (all the while, of course, I was claiming that I was denying the standard, rejecting it ... )

Vito Acconci

#25. It's maddening how someone so easy to read can be so impossible to understand.

Stephanie Perkins

#26. A self-made martyr is a poor thing.

Ellen Glasgow

#27. Everybody uses labels: they give you a handle on things - an over-simplified handle, sure, but without labels, without ads, without words, the world would be an indistinguishable mass, a blur. You can hope, maybe, that people ascribe so many labels to you that none wins out

Vito Acconci

#28. I can pick out people in this city to follow. I can be in a show at the Museum of Modern Art, my space in the Museum of Modern Art is my mailbox, my mail is delivered there. Whenever I want mail, I have to go through this city to get my mail.

Vito Acconci

#29. Especially once those poetry events began, because, yeah, the stuff was still on the page, but the page was starting to spill into real space, spill into air, once you could hear it, once there was a typewriter, once there was a body of a typist, it was getting rid of the confines of the page.

Vito Acconci