Vito Acconci Quotes

#1. we Stoners must be peaceful, unarmed, and open to nonviolence. It's up to us to be the example of how peace is possible. Work for peace, evolve.

Withered Tree

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

Vito Acconci

#3. I'm sensitive, you know, about some things, and as some of my partners could attest to, incredibly insensitive.

Jackson Browne

#4. He nods, his eyes on her like he's reading a book he's just getting to the end of and can't be interrupted.

Alden Bell

#5. 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

#6. What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#7. Children aren't just our future. They're our present.

Ricky Martin

#8. 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

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

Vito Acconci

#10. Were you watching me sleep? Because I thought we agreed that's creepy.

Ilona Andrews

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

Vito Acconci

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. [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

#16. 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

#17. slept on the priest's floor last night. We got very drunk." "You and the padre got smashed? What was the occasion?" "Clergy Appreciation Day." "That's a thing?" "Apparently so. Got drunk with a priest last night. Broke a televangelist's wrist this morning. My new favorite holiday.

Tiffany Reisz

#18. 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

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

Vito Acconci

#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. I didn't sleep with him, Parker. He held my hair while I hurled a pint of Petron in his toilet. That's as romantic as it got.

Jamie McGuire

#22. [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

#23. Food is the only beautiful thing that truly nourishes.

Richard Gere

#24. 127. Craft a poem about sadness and darkness but using only positive words.

Ryan Andrew Kinder

#25. 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

#26. 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