“Viewing visual art—works that deal with ripping off the polite skin of society—stimulates me. When in that process of discovery I return again and again to the paintings of Francis Bacon, de Kooning’s women,
the portraiture of the South African painter Marlene Dumas, the works of Louise Bourgeois. In recent memory, the retrospective of Glenn Ligon at the Whitney moved me—his appropriation of texts and popular culture as well as the political consciousness of his work, which is akin to one of my favorite radical writers Kathy Acker. I often wish to be stirred up, agitated, when fomenting projects, but when actually writing I need to be calm—listening to the same Haydn piano sonatas or Arvo Pärt’s choral works over and over, or being in complete silence, drinking two glasses of silver needle white tea in the AM, walking the dog, eating regular strict vegetarian meals, practicing yoga.”
—Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines (Semiotext(e), 2012)