Kenneth Goldsmith Quotes

An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination.

Automation and technology don't cure behavioral ruts: they just create new instances of them.

If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.

It's not plagiarism in the digital age -- it's repurposing.

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

Conceptual writing is looking for that "Aha!" moment, when something so simple, right under our noses, is revealed as being awe- inspiring, profound, and transcendent.

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

I think that the richer and deeper documentation is on the web, the better off we all are.

I've been trolled lots on Twitter. But I understand trolls for what they are and I don't let them get to me. They take my bait, so I'm in charge of the discourse.

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.

Favoriting tweets has become a form of acknowledging that you've read what someone else has written.

Art used to make me see the world differently, think about things in a new way - it rarely does that for me anymore, but technology does that for me on a daily basis.

I've been trolled lots. But I understand trolls for what they are and I don't let them get to me. They take my bait, so I'm in charge of the discourse.

Poets think in short lines. Unless you're Samuel Beckett, Twitter might be more difficult for novelists.

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.

I think it's time to admit that our writing is guided by the technology we use as much as it is by our own subjectivity.

How fortunate we are to exist in the moneyless economy of poetry! When you take money out of the equation, anything goes and nobody cares. It's truly free.

For me, Twitter is a public persona. I don't interact. It's a lousy form for conversation and opinion, but a wonderful propaganda and sloganeering tool. I use it as a one-way street.

It's Twitter's combination of simplicity and complexity that is astonishing in the same way that minimalist sculpture was inspiring and enlightening.

Twitter is not art. But it inspires me in the way that art used to inspire me.

I don't think that the world will ever become an unpoliced place, sadly. But I do feel that there is relative freedom on the margins.

I think that the special thing about radio is the off switch. If something's not pleasing you, turn it off.

Most artists want first and foremost to be loved, secondly to make history, and money is a distant third or fourth.

It's hard to be understood when addressing many people at once. How can you ever know if you're being understood? So, I've just started being intelligently provocative. And people take the bait.

What I'm doing in writing has been thoroughly and exhaustively explored in other fields like visual art, music, and cinema, yet somehow it's never really been tested on the page.

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.

You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I’m telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren’t reading it.