Best 39 quotes of Chris Kraus on MyQuotes

Because I'm moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there's not enough female irrepressibility written down. I've fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender's silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.

In Mexico, muralism is an important part of the artistic vocabulary, and it has a very different place than it does in the US. Here, you see mainly commercial signage and dead slick graphic works, or murals that are incredibly narrative and littered with too much content - bad political art. But in Mexicali, all kinds of artists work with mural art. In Mexicali, the social practice of art existed in a completely authentic and unselfconscious way.

I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructiv e but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.

I think what makes you feel so connected with certain writers isn't a matter of autobiographical detail, but that the emotions are real. The way some writers are able to channel themselves through the form.

I think writers always want to be taken seriously as writers, but it's not always possible. There's a difference between persistence and banging your head against the same wall a hundred times. Sometimes it's better to look away from the wall and see what else might be available that's easier.

It's going to be crazy. All eight teams here are good teams. Hopefully the atmosphere will be great because it's going to be great basketball.

No one...can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.

Stalinism - or communism - is the only ideology Americans know how to demonise... no one knows what it is, it's just a synonym for the Empire of Evil.

Why do people think that we’re degraded when we’re examining positions of degradation, or examining the cycle of our own degradation?

Writing can be bad and still be part of something good. That 'art' is really 'artifact,' Exhibit A, Exhibit B, of something else: a person's whole experience and life. And that always there's the chance that this will fail. That things will not work out.

All acts of sex were forms of degradation. ... What do you do with the Serious Young Woman (short hair, flat shoes, body slightly hunched, head drifting back and forth between the books she's read)? You slap her, fuck her up the ass and treat her like a boy. The Serious Young Woman looked everywhere for sex but when she got it it became an exercise in disintegration. What was the motivation of these men? Was it hatred she evoked? Was it some kind of challenge, trying to make the Serious Young Woman femme?

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. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention.

Because she does not express herself in theoretical language, no one expects too much from her and she is used to tripping out on layers of complexity in total silence.

[Being rejected] hurt, 'cause what turned me on in sex was believing that they knew me, that I'd found somebody to understand.

Better, perhaps, to dress like a whore around the clock and thus achieve a fully integrated personality.

Cause shame was what we always felt, me and all my girlfriends, for expecting sex to breed complicity. ("Complicity is like a girl's name," writes Dodie Bellamy).

Dear Dick, I guess it's been a case of infatuation... Mostly this infatuation-energy is about wanting to know someone. ... Whereas the sex-infatuations that's male *you, Shake, the priest) leap out of nowhere, based on not knowing them at all. As if sex could provide the missing clues. Can it? In the cases of the males it's like I felt some kind of hint of who that person was floating under the surface. Wanting sex to realise things I knew.

Dear Dick, I'm not sure I still want to fuck you. At least, not in the same way. Sylvère keeps talking about us disturbing your "fragility", but I'm not sure that I agree. There's nothing so remarkable in one more woman adoring you. It's a "problem" you're confronting all the time. I'm just a particularly annoying one, one who refuses to behave... And yet I feel this tenderness towards you, after all we've been through.

Desire isn't lack, it's surplus energy - a claustrophobia inside your skin -.

Female monsters take things as personally as they really are. They study facts. Even if rejection makes them feel like the girl who's not invited to the party, they have to understand the reasons why. ... Every question, once it's formulated, is a paradigm, contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves with false questions. And I told Warren: I aim to be a female monster too.

If art's a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become the subject too.

If women have failed to make “universal” art because we’re trapped within the “personal,” why not universalize the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?

I got together with Sylvère because I saw how I could help him get his life together. I'm drawn to you cause I see how you can help me take my life apart...

Isn't the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong? What hooks me on our story is our different readings of it. You think it's personal and private; my neurosis... I think our story is performative philosophy.

Is there a way," she wrote in closing, "to dignify sex, make it as complicated as we are, to make it not grotesque?

It was the kind of story everybody likes, about a tough girl who becomes a truer version of herself by uncovering her vulnerability. It was the kind of story people like because its universe is played out in the story of one person. It was the kind of story (dare I say it?) that women are supposed to write because all its truths are grounded in a single lie: denying chaos.

Oh Dick, you eroticise what you're not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too.

Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren't all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, 'cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn't learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix.

S: But Chris, I think his embarrassment isn't in relation to you or me but to himself. What can he do? C: I hate being thrown into such a physical state. S: Isn't that experiencing life to the hilt? C: No, it's just a dumb infatuation. I'm so ashamed. S: But even if his silence hurts you, isn't that what attracted you to him? The fact that he was inaccessible. So, I think there is a contradiction there, at least nothing to feel ashamed of -.

So don't be too fast to attribute yourself with miraculous sexual powers, The Christ of Love. Emma and I created you out of nothing, or very little, and in all fairness, You owe us everything. While you flounder in your daily life we have built you up as a truly powerful icon of erotic integrity.

The schizophrenic... will suddenly burst out with the most incredible details of your life, things that you would never imagine anyone could know and he will tell you in the most abrupt way truths that you believed to be absolutely secret," Félix said in an interview with Caroline Laure and Vittorio Marchetti (Chaosophy). Schizophrenics aren't sunk into themselves. Associatively, they're hyperactive. The world gets cremy like a library. And schizophrenics are the most generous of scholars because they're emotionally right there, they don't just formulate, observe. They're willing to become the situated person's expectations. "The schizophrenic has lightning access to you," Félix continued. "He internalizes all the links between you, makes them part of his subjective system." This is empathy to the highest power: the schizophrenic turns into a seer, then enacts that vision through his or her becoming. But when doen empathy turn into dissolution?

...to understand infatuation, how the loved person can become a holding pattern for all the tattered ends of memory, experience and thought you've ever had.

We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?

We've met a few times and I've felt a lot of sympathy towards you and a desire to be closer... I had a feeling that somehow I knew you and we could just be what we are together.

What's the matter?" you asked, seizing an idea. "Did I burst your balloon - destroy the fantasy?" I struggled for a way to answer this without my clothes. ... Well his was very cruel, but loving you'd become a full-time job and I wasn't ready to be unemployed.

When the form's in place, everything within it can be pure feeling.

When you're living so intensely in your head there isn't any different between what you imagine and what actually takes place. Therefore, you're both omnipotent and powerless.

Why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it's neuroticised and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?

Your cowboy persona meshed so well with the dreams Chris has of the torn and silent men she's been rejected by. The fact that you don't return messages turns your answerphone into a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies.