“I think in terms of mega structures. I work out the form and then begin to fill it in.”

“I always knew that the only kind of journalist I was going to be was a critic.”

“For me, this is the power of Ailey: that a dance exhibition would also have to be an exhibition about cultural history.”

“I use painting, but I’m not a painter.”

“I’ve always seen photography as the route to being in trouble. When people aren’t mad at me, I’m surprised.”

“Her legacy isn’t lost, but continuously with us in various shapes and forms.”

“At a certain point I couldn’t bear the work ‘on behalf of’—the condition of thinking for some other person.”

“I don’t think that it’s impossible to live a full life without cooking, but if you want to eat well, you have to cook.”

“We realized that living your life on the internet kind of sucks.”

“The humanities are in the process of either elimination or repackaging into revenue-generating digital enterprises.”

“I think the future’s invented more by mistakes than it is by design.”

“If this doesn’t work, then we’re going to have to fucking find other jobs.”

“I’m most interested in making form work harder and in service of subject matter.”

“I didn’t know how to be socially, but I understood sex.”

“There is no more mysterious force than the act of storytelling.”

“I love the idea of following one mind as it bobs and weaves around.”

“I am one of those feminists who concentrates on what we did accomplish rather than what we didn’t.”

“People betray themselves and others all the time.”

“Critique is a tool for understanding, but it’s not the end of the process.”

“Performance often involves finding new information in the process of creating.”

“In the world of design, it’s not only beneficial to be a generalist, but necessary.”

“I didn’t know what the rules were, but then I learned that there weren’t any.”

“Borders are just a nuisance and an obstacle, but now we have to live with them.”

“Museums and galleries kind of train people in passivity.”

“You need to have a solid structure to doodle around.”

“What does it mean to understand oneself within a specific juncture of AIDS history?”

“Nothing makes a community like a fucking disaster.”

“Douglas’ insistence on emerging politically out of the confinement of being labeled a problem remains life-giving.”

“Withholding is not about opacity or refusal, it is about participating on one’s own terms.”

“We have a sense of solidarity, not only across any social, political, or cultural differences, but across time.”

“Most of my books are, at heart, me banging my head against a brick wall.”

“For the men who died before us, we are definitely the generation that they were praying for.”

“The way you walk out of Plato’s cave is through the removal of judgment and the practice of acceptance.”

“I think that there’s actually a dumb optimism in a lot of what I do.”

“I’ve never been interested in being consumed by the joke.”

“I couldn’t help but notice that other critics weren’t at the Pyramid Club or 8BC at 2 in the morning.”

“I’ve never felt quite like a woman because I disobeyed.”

“Punk is that freedom to do it yourself, even if it’s sloppy and messy.”

“Sound allows us to both contract and expand the frame.”

“Everyone told me not to move to Los Angeles because there was no money for art.”

“It remains difficult to imagine an American avant-garde outside the publisher’s influential network.”

“A corporation is a way to disappear, to have impunity. It’s a legitimate kind of thuggery.”

“Play is a form of thinking.”

“I’ve been erased from the official history of Semiotext(e).”

“I’ve never been able to fully commit to the art world.”

“I would get bored only talking to celebrities for the rest of my life.”

“Comedy is just as much timing and sound as it is space and distance.”

“I’m not at all a left-wing melancholic.”

“What would ecological ethics be within artistic production?”

“Novelists are always living in an alternative universe. One walks back and forth through a gossamer curtain.”

“I want to refuse modes of interpretation that are ultimately aimed at putting the art object to work.”

“I’ve realized that my work is about claiming monumentality through something more temporal.”

“Season one of The Bear was a punk song. It was like a punch in the mouth. Season two is an album.”

“Math calms me in a way nothing else does—by not calculating, I realized I’d starved my brain of oxygen.”

“I do not know why Less Than Zero has stuck around. It actually has outstayed its welcome.”

“That’s the driving force in my work: what if this world didn’t have to be the world?”

“All I had at that time was a headshot and a resume full of lies.”

“I’m perhaps most of all interested in a sense of disorientation, and of not knowing.”

“Style, to me, means there’s something happening on the exterior that suggests an interesting interior.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had ambition, but I’ve had drive.”

“I don’t come to this book as a parent; I come to this book as a descendant.”

“I like stories about people who are secretly intelligent.”

“When you’re working in a journalistic framework, you’re going to be making the donuts and you may like the donuts but you did not design the donuts.”

“The body generates administration. And then there’s the administration of the body.”

“I do wonder whether it is such a good idea to make trauma the center of political demands.”

“Like a worm or octopus, a novel can have more than one heart.”

“Goethe remarked, back in the 18th century, that a man of 50 knows no more than a man of 20; they just know different things.”

“We are believers in practice.”

“You have to learn not to worry about what people are going to think of you personally.”

“We can’t walk in anyone else’s shoes. Maybe the goal—not just of art, but also of being here—is to walk beside one another.”

“Lineages that focus only on proper-named artists are not only Eurocentric and masculinist but plain boring.”

“An individual painting, it ends on kind of a period. Whereas a body of work ends with a question.”

“What fantasy of salvation is left over for the writer?”

“The most generative thing you can do as a writer is to go out and see other people’s work.”

“It was a lot easier to be yourself before the Internet, before you were constantly being shown what the other possibilities were.”

“For me, the life of theory has been shaped by the experience of untimely loss.”

“That was the cleverness of Andy’s business structure: you could be the editor of Interview if you could figure out how to pay for it.”

“Something lived-in and repaired in a beautiful way is itself beautiful.”

“Why should I be reading something that isn’t going to change or influence me to have a new feeling?”

“Critical theory, not art or architecture, was the avant-garde of that time.”

“Activism can be, and often has been, about bringing dignity to life and death.”

“The new tools ended up in the same old hands.”

“I think the hardest thing as an artist is to find form for your questions.”

“Where’s the anti-aesthetic? The critique of practice is gone.”

“These terms—‘What do we own?’; ‘What is the same?’—were among the modes of address floating around at the time and seemed to fit.”

“There is now a postmodernism cobbled together from these antecedents that hangs over contemporary culture.”

“I’m not interested in just looking but in having an experience and then expanding from there.”

“The ability to self-represent is crucial; it is the first condition of possibility for any kind of representation.”

“The futurist California never happened—it was never tried.”

“I’ve never been someone who could be influenced very easily.”

“I’m always cognizant of life being the most interesting thing, and writing coming out of that.”

“I’ve only lived my gay sex life in English.”

“Painting can only live if it wants to die.”

“What does it mean to problematize your own memory or your own sense of self?”

“I had the most boring job of all of my friends who were working in the early days of Hip-hop.”

“My body, your body, was already implicated in the zero degree of painting from day one.”

“I have always wanted to fight cultural amnesia, and I don’t know how we do that without museums.”

“I’m writing to anyone with a political imagination.”

“There is this moment when you have to reject everything in order to push yourself forward.”

“I like a kind of writing that’s irreducible—just itself and nothing else.”

“How do we labor to bring ourselves into the present?”

“I think we need to de-frame art and let it be free.”

“I spent my youth in a world of women who were, and who insisted to be, witnesses to the fate of women.”

“What matters is not only the writing of time as history but the writing processes of technologies.”

“All my life I’d been having arguments with myself that I couldn’t properly solve within the jurisdiction of myself.”

“I’m interested in all the forces that liberate and constrict sound.”

“Trans women have never had an ongoing, well-documented, accessible, aesthetically varied, interracial culture.”

“My work is about staging and confronting our reality with fiction.”

“I like to be both inside and outside.”

“The ecological is a sensibility.”

“It’s too easy to be curious, but not optimistic; or optimistic, but not curious.”

“Torture and therapy here are not antipodal.”

“Simulation faced the same unceremonious end as its referent.”

“We are forever circling the drain.”

“There’s something freeing about not owning every word.”

“At this edge of legibility, we can find new language, frameworks, and tools.”

“People sometimes thought I cared more about myself than I did.”

“Not having moments to grieve is a combination of raced, classed, and gendered positionality.”

“I was already the enemy to a lot of the activists, because I wasn’t representing gays in a positive way.”

“They stood around, laughing, while drugs crumbled in their blood.”

“If I ever reached a milestone I would run away in horror.”

“We could say that the entire enterprise of art has a gimmick problem.”

“‘Asian American’ identity may be a construction but the social and psychic life of racialized people in America is very real.”

“My attention tends to focus on the micro, on what’s right in front of my face—I let associations spiral out from there.”

“The store was about conversations between worlds and how those conversations meshed together and only Sara could do that.”

“I decided to schmear my queer Jewish pinko self in schmaltz and go out and grease up the stage.”

“I can’t think of architecture as anything other than a performative art form.”

“Blackness presents the possibility of a thoroughly anti-Idealist aesthetic and theory of objects.”

“I’ve never understood catharsis.”

“Sacrifice is a pointed instance of dépense, an exquisitely sacred combustion, and one that runs throughout Bataille’s economics.”

“L’informe comes out of WWII, the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust.”

“At the core, I think of my creative language as being rather formless.”

“It’s easy to recognize specters of Bataille’s thought today, for better and for worse.”

“It’s easy to recognize specters of Bataille’s thought today, for better and for worse.”

“I experienced my transness as a shape the Internet made when it looked at me.”

“The idea of three-act structure is in my head a lot, destroying my stories before they really begin.”

“We don’t need to go beyond blackness. It’s not a before and after question.”

“Even though I don’t see criticism as art, I don’t see it as secondary to art. I see it as a practice parallel to it.”

“There will be gradual changes in the art world, but the arts are often the last to change.”

“Architecture is not about the wellbeing of humans at all. It doesn’t simply house the human, it remakes the human.”

“One mantra in particular strikes me in this moment—and it is from John Waters’s Female Trouble—‘crime is beauty.’”

“The modern manifestation of the museum has its origins as a colonial and disciplining institution.”

“Things improving for old women artists is like things improving for Black Americans. Things improve. But things stay shitty.”

“Historically, queer women have been on the front lines of every progressive movement, but not always openly.”

“The paradigmatic Hongkonger, especially from the generations between 1949 and 1997, is transnational and neoliberal.”

“The essential antagonism is not between the workers and bosses but between the Humans and the Blacks.”

“When living honorably is more important than staying alive, you’re ready to fight effectively for what you believe in.”

“November is both a map and an archive of our cultural present and possible futures.”