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Quote by Kenneth Goldsmith

“My books are better thought about than read. They're insanely dull and unreadable.But they're wonderful to talk about and think about, to dip in and out of, to hold, to have on your shelf.”

Quote by Kenneth Goldsmith

Author

Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith, born in 1961, is a renowned poet known for his profound reflections on language and culture. His works often employ techniques of textual collage and repetition to explore themes such as memory, history, and identity. more

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“I don't have a readership, I have a thinkership. I guess this is why what I do is called "conceptual writing." The idea is much more important than the product.”

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“I never wanted my books to be mistaken for poetry or fiction books; I wanted to write reference books. But instead of referring to something, they refer to nothing.”

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“The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something "meaningful," we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning.”

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“You can't show me a sentence, word, or phoneme that is meaningless; by its nature, language is packed with meaning and emotion.”

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“We're living in a time when the sheer amount of language has exponentially increased. As writers, if we wish to be contemporary, I think we need to acknowledge that the very nature of the materials that we're working with - the landscape of language - is very different than it was a few decades ago.”

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“I really like looking at other people's book collections when I'm at someone's house. I think it is an amazing cross section of a person's brain and lifestyle. I think everyone should photograph their book spines and make a website. Seriously.”

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“All of our media is made of language: our films, our music, our images, and of course our words. How different this is from analog production, where, if you were somehow able to peel back the emulsion from, say, a photograph, you wouldn't find a speck of language lurking below the surface.”

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“Language is material to shape and mold, not only a transparent or invisible medium for communication, business contracts, or telling stories.”

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“When I read War and Peace in Norway, really far away from humanity for a long time, it was such an amazing, affirming blast of "humanity" in all forms. It totally cracked my mind-nut open and rainbows shot out. I loved humanity and being alive, rather than wanting to bury my head in the snow.”

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“My favorite method of encryption is chunking revolutionary documents inside a mess of JPEG or MP3 code and emailing it off as an "image" or a "song." But besides functionality, code also possesses literary value. If we frame that code and read it through the lens of literary criticism, we will find that the past hundred years of modernist and postmodernist writing have demonstrated the artistic value of similar seemingly arbitrary arrangements of letters.”