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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

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Kenneth Goldsmith
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: January 1
Music Critic
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Freeport
Long Island
New York
Kenny Goldsmith
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More quotes by Kenneth Goldsmith

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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
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New York City is just one node on the global cultural scene. Social media reflects the state of the world, so I've become more devoted to that. To be a NYC artist feels local and small. Social media feels now.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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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
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Favoriting tweets has become a form of acknowledging that you've read what someone else has written.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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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.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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It's not plagiarism in the digital age -- it's repurposing.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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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
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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.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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I wonder if Karl Ove Knausgård would've written the same books today had been using Twitter. It wasn't around when he was writing those books. Those books were written during the age of the blog, with its big verbiage. The landscape has completely changed today.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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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.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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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.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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And I think this is the real epiphany: the ways in which culture is distributed become profoundly more intriguing as a cultural artifact itself. What we've experienced is an inversion of consumption, one in which we've come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring, the bottles over the wine.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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Most artists want first and foremost to be loved, secondly to make history, and money is a distant third or fourth.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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Twitter is not art. But it inspires me in the way that art used to inspire me. 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.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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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.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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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
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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.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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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.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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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.
Kenneth Goldsmith
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An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination.
Kenneth Goldsmith