15 Quotes by Vito Acconci

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.

I always thought of writing as public, I never thought of writing a diary. I had been struck by, jolted by things I had read, and I wanted to do the same to others. I don’t think it ever was the notion of an autobiography; I skipped that phase totally, I think.

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.

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.

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.

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.