Kenneth Goldsmith Quotes

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

Kenneth Goldsmith

#2. For me, Twitter is a public persona. It's UbuWeb or Kenneth Goldsmith (as opposed to Kenny Goldsmith). I don't interact. It's a lousy form for conversation and opinion (what can you really say in 140 characters?), but a wonderful propaganda and sloganeering tool. I use it as a one-way street.

Kenneth Goldsmith

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

Kenneth Goldsmith

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

Kenneth Goldsmith

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

Kenneth Goldsmith

#6. 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.

Kenneth Goldsmith

#7. If you don't want something to exist - and there are many reasons to want to keep things private - keep it off the web. But if you put it in digital form, expect it to be bootlegged, remixed, manipulated, and endlessly commented upon.

Kenneth Goldsmith

#8. 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.

Kenneth Goldsmith

#9. I think that writers often try too hard in the name of expression, when often it's just a matter of reframing what's around you or republishing a preexisting text into a new environment that makes for a successful work.

Kenneth Goldsmith

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

Kenneth Goldsmith

#11. 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.

Kenneth Goldsmith

#12. I often don't endorse what I tweet, rather I want to throw things about to spark conversation or controversy. What I think about something is not particularly important when talking to thousands of unknown strangers.

Kenneth Goldsmith

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

Kenneth Goldsmith

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

Kenneth Goldsmith

#15. Everyone complains that we can no longer intake huge chunks of text. I find that a reason to celebrate. It's something that has deep roots in modernism, stretching from the Futurists' use of typography to Pound's use of ideograms to concrete poetry.

Kenneth Goldsmith

#16. 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.

Kenneth Goldsmith

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

Kenneth Goldsmith

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

Kenneth Goldsmith

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

Kenneth Goldsmith

#20. 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.

Kenneth Goldsmith

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

Kenneth Goldsmith