Daily Inspiration Quote by Kathy Acker

Permission can sound like generosity; in Kathy Acker’s mouth it sounds like a dare. “You can do whatever you want with my work” reads less like a benign blessing than a deliberate booby-trap for the idea of authorship itself. Acker built her reputation on plagiarism-as-method, cutting and splicing canonical texts until “originality” looked like what it often is: a property claim wearing a literary beret. So the line is an ethical reversal. If she took from the culture’s vault, she’s also flinging her own pages back into the commons and challenging you to admit you were always borrowing, too.

The intent is partly practical (use it, remix it, circulate it), partly confrontational. It taunts institutions that police art through ownership: publishers, courts, critics, and the gatekeepers who decide whose theft counts as innovation and whose counts as crime. Coming from an activist, it also echoes a politics of access. Art shouldn’t be a locked room; it should be contraband that moves.

The subtext is where Acker is sharpest. She’s refusing the sentimental author-as-genius narrative and the control-freak fantasy that a text has a single correct meaning. “Whatever you want” doesn’t just authorize adaptation; it anticipates misreading, misuse, even betrayal. That’s the point. If readers can’t violate the work, the work isn’t alive.

Context matters: late-20th-century punk feminism, postmodern appropriation, the culture wars over obscenity, and the tightening grip of copyright as creativity’s invisible bouncer. Acker’s line turns that bouncer into a joke: go ahead, steal it. She already stole the idea that it was ever “hers.”