I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.

Posthumous reputation
Acker's work has been acknowledged by a number of younger writers working in an experimental style including Michael Hemmingson Stewart Home Mark Amerika Barry Graham Anna Joy Springer Tribe 8 singer and writer Lynn Breedlove Alexander Laurence Tamil novelist Charu Nivedita Michael Boatman Noah Cicero Travis Jeppesen and Salvador Plascencia. However one of Acker’s more controversial plagiarisms is from William Gibson’s 1984 text ‘'Neuromancer’' in which Acker equates code with the female body and its militaristic implications. Acker took her last name from her first husband Robert Acker; though named Karen Kathy Acker was known as Kathy by her friends and family.

Burroughs David Antin French critical theory philosophy and pornography. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School William S. Kathy Acker (née Karen Lehmann; April 18 1947 – November 30 1997) was an American experimental novelist punk poet playwright essayist postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer.