Martijn Benders Quotes & Sayings

I really dont feel that persons who discovered in 2011 after 6 years of struggle how to install a wordpress weblog have the right to the word 'avantgarde'. — Martijn Benders

I have female friends that get mails from publishers that read 'Hey. I heard you write about sex. This is a very popular topic now'. — Martijn Benders

What is the role of intellectuals in Europe? There's this debate in which all speakers do not appear to me to even be intellectuals. Why is Martin Sommers an intellectual? It is a political journalist who writes mediocre pieces. If that is sufficient to call yourself a 'European intellectual then the question of the debate has already become rhetorical. — Martijn Benders

Who 'waits for inspiration' has probably never explored the brain. Its much larger than the entire internet. Writing, however, is partly stalking the big wave, and ride it when it comes. However, the thousands and thousands of blokes sitting at the shoreline trying to create waves by splashing their hands in the surf - it might be what they teach at writer workshops, but the sight is absolutely ghastly. — Martijn Benders

Every writer on this planet THINKS he is a great writer (why waste your entire life writing when you believe you are mediocre?) but its deemed socially unacceptable to actually speak out such thoughts. So, modesty is always a public concept and not an inner one. For that reason alone 'modesty' can actually be said to be the product of a large ego, for the ego is primarily concerned with survival and society rewards this dishonesty and tends to punish honesty (see Camus) — Martijn Benders

Tell me, what kind of functions does pain have when one is convicted to 100 whippings in Saudie Arabia? You claim pain has a function, I claim that's scientific rubbish. The only thing pain really does is cause an instant reaction that is not rational and usually quite erratic. The famous example of the hand in boiling water, for example. You say it proves pain has a function. But exactly because of the spasmic reaction lots and lots of people will drop the bowl with boiling water over their entire bodies causing serious burns. So what was the 'function' of this pain? Pain and fear cause confusion and trauma. If pain actually did have a rational function, chronic pain would not exist. — Martijn Benders

I tried to google one line i found I thought was great, turns out i wrote it myself. Trying not to feel old now. — Martijn Benders

But the real and actual 'riggedness' of the Eurovision lies in the vision it presents to us as to what 'Culture' is supposed to be: a monotone, cheap, cloned industrialized song with some glamour attached. The formula is always the same: 24 cloned songs, like computer automated, and 2 'crazy' ones so it seems that all this clonedness is actually supported by creativity. But in this image of 'craziness' there is the same formula: cloned, boring songs with some carnavalesque stuff attached. The factual dynamics of the event are in fact fascist: its almost purely Riefenstahl, but the Chinese mass production version of it. It shows us one thing and one thing only: Countries are an illusion, they are all the same. There are no countries. — Martijn Benders

I think i am too chaotic to ever get depressed. Depression somehow requires an ordered mind where the depression can get hold. Depressions just give up on me, usually at first sight. It's mutual - I find them really tedious and boring. — Martijn Benders

I know its totally senseless to attempt to write something 'great' in a time where people seem mostly concerned with bashing each other heads in, there's only 1 bestseller a year that a 12 year old would find tedious, and the entire Human Race will probably be nonexistant a 100 years later, but - you know - i have no idea what else to do. I like creating. What else can i do? — Martijn Benders

Why do most people write poems about nature? For the same reason that every community center is propped up with industrious, self painted landscapes: you have no need of any imagination to simply describe what is around you, and the amateur naturally thinks an idyllic picture is best, not the dirty city around him. What makes van de Waarsenburg special is that he crams a hundred idyllic scenes into a single poem, as if he does not trust a single boathouse would be poetic enough for the reader. — Martijn Benders

Last week I wrote that the reason Hollywood films are so bad last 10 years is that all the better scriptwriters were hired by the Pentagon. Today in the news: Pentagon refused to cooperate with movie 'Avengers' for it found its script 'not realistic enough'. — Martijn Benders

People who write poetry while walking their dog can't possibly write poetry i'd be fucking interested in — Martijn Benders

Not to mention the fact that the belief in conspiracy theories is already a form of conspiracy theory in itself. It's to me not quite clear on what basis you would assume that one conspiracy is no conspiracy, and the others are. Capitalism drives on conspiracy theories as well: they believe in a certain power that creates a "free market" and that you can sit and grow forever on finite resources. This newspaper article obviously did not mean 'conspiracy theory' but 'urban legend', because the question if there are ufos landing on earth and whether you want to believe this seems to have little to do with conspiracy. And whether that is an urban legend worthy of belief is not undisputed. I think people who believe in such things are actually less illogical than people who believe housing associations are useful. — Martijn Benders

If you ask me, I think Jerry Springer destroyed the public image of the USA. I mean up to early in the nineties I still imagined it like it was presented in hollywoodfilms and stuff. But then, early in the 90's they started broadcasting that freakshow in the Netherlands, and that new idea of entertainment, where you put the biggest morons you can find on screen so you can watch it and feel superior. Later on, politics also discovered the same formula. We want politicians we feel superior to. The very idea of anything being 'better' or 'higher' than us makes people extremely uncomfortable. — Martijn Benders

Talent is 98% hard work - even Brel said so. The best signal for lack of talent is therefore quite simply low production. That does of course not mean high production guarantees talent, so something does exist that needs to be present - what is that? Talent and Drive - both are quite useless without the other, but what exactly is 'talent'? I would say its a form of the unconditioned: in some people it survives, even unto old age. Some learn to focus it on a particular craft. But without drive, it still goes nowhere. — Martijn Benders

I bought a backscrabber. One more reason to have no need for a relationship. — Martijn Benders

I'm kind of bored with being the boss of the internet. It doesn't feel right without the massage. — Martijn Benders

I have always said that whomever has limited preferences cannot be a critic, for the same reason some guy who only likes blondes cant be a jury in a beauty contest, for his idea of beauty is predefined and not based on dynamic reality. Thus, what people call 'preferences' are in fact exactly what makes them blind. For this reason being a writer also means you essentially cannot have the same markup as ordinary people, because getting rid of the precomposed is a too essential part of the whole dynamics of writing. — Martijn Benders

Modern politics is like watching a film with only bad guys. It soon starts to get really boring, because one of the points of stories is that they should have some sort of redeeming character, or, at the very least, trick the viewer into believing such. But seeing the world nowadays has no such effect, its bad guys VS bad guys VS bad guys, and all you can think about is how the hell can I switch off this horrible depravity — Martijn Benders

In a neurotic society, insane ideas can become 'normal', the current triumph of tribalism is the result of rabid global anti-intellectualism. — Martijn Benders

The people on television scoffing and laughing at mediocrity - they are the real mediocrity. — Martijn Benders

If you want to be a poet, there is no greater mistake you could make than to publish whatever work you have as soon as you can. Why? Well because your debut is the only shot you have. It should be made of dynamite. There is nothing worse - believe me - than to have an oeuvre with a mediocre debut, and likely you wont get that far at all, and you will wait for reviews that wont come, just a horrible idea really. I don't need tell this to the rare and extreme talents - they are like a force of nature - but i am talking to the rest of you. People who love their youth don't make it easy on them - making it easy for them is a way to destroy them, But the representatives of my generation have no clue,or idea about Bildung at all, which is why I am at odds with most of them. — Martijn Benders

Something in me - probably a small, nationalist dwarf part of my brain - something in me would like to feel proud of Dutch literature. But its hard to when the annual 'book week gift' year in year out is granted to a male. I dont like being part of an unjust system. But let me say this: it is the election method that is the real problem here. The 'vergadering' (meeting) that employs a simple flagging system - the basic way almost everything is decided here, from literary prizes to how much money is divided - it is a system based on the destruction of subtle values. You cannot ever ever say: I didnt understand this book. You can only say 'yes' or 'no'. And that system, that annihilates all forms of subtlety, that system is patriarchal in all its essence. So its useless to simply maintain the method, and try alter the outcome. — Martijn Benders

I can't understand how people can have grown up in the eighties, amidst all this competitive spirit, gangster battles, hiphop - and still pretend that artists are 'colleagues' that should be bloody nice to each other. I mean that's like the 60's, not the 80's. I grew up with the idea of putting a cap in the ass of bad rhyming niggers. So that's what i did. And they all started frontin me, copycats and dinosaurs, but they have nothing on me. To me, the house generation of the 90's is excused - I never pick fights with these ecstasy heads. I just wanna bury all the dinosaurs that don't get ill. — Martijn Benders

Literature is impossible, in exactly this sense: every new generation has so much 'catching up' to do that the real choice that presents itself soon is the following one: one either spends ones entire life just reading all the classics, or one pretends to be 'contemporary and hip' and never reads any of the classics because in order to pretend to be contemporary one has to at least superficially read the works of contemporaries. Hence the dilemma: one either does not care about being fashionable, or one is fashionable and just learns to mimic some knowledge about the classics. As time develops this rift just becomes bigger, because the amount of books written grows and grows to insane proportions. Conclusion: one can only be hip in the future if one does not read at all, which is a phenomenon I am already witnessing in the media. — Martijn Benders

My Latin girlfriend sees me read, snigger, read on intensily and said "you look like someone who is attacked by a butterfly "" mails one of the first recipients of the complete Wold, Wold, Wold! book. It's a guy i know who lives in South America. I think it's one of the best descriptions I have ever seen about what i really want to accomplish: to write books that attack one like a giant butterfly. — Martijn Benders

When one would ask most modern artists, poets, writers and other status quo fueled semi-intellectuals who Machiavelli was - was that an opera singer? — Martijn Benders

Thinking outside the box' is ridiculous nonsense, since whatever you can do in a 'box' or closed environment is not 'thinking'. If I 'think' about a problem but limit my thoughts to certain dimensions - then i am not thinking at all, because thinking implies that one at least tries to take all relevant factors into consideration, and as there's usually no way to tell which factors are and which are not relevant restricted thought is not 'thinking' and so 'thinking outside the box' is simply a eufemism for 'let's start to think', but the metafor implies a hidden desire to return to conformity immediately. — Martijn Benders

I started this dirty quote business when I noticed that I only tend to read authors when their quotes convince me of wit and style. In a world overflowing with bad literature and corrupted product-placement critics the only weapon one has is either word of mouth or quotes, and me I highly prefer the latter. So I have just decided that I will only post to facebook through goodreads quotes. That's policy that makes a lot of sense for a writer. — Martijn Benders

Mr Rutger cornet de Groot. Never read any American poetry or any other foreign poetry, which is why he always mentions 2 poets as a reffering point, either Lucebert or Tonnus Oosterhoff. The guy started reading when he was 48 years old with a few library books and was turned instantly in one of the most important critics hired by the fund of literature. Oh well. — Martijn Benders

Ramadan is not fasting. Ramadan is an Islamic feast where one stuffs oneself twice a day with food, and in between lets ones intestines dry out. To describe that process as 'fasting' seems rather ubiquitous to me. The amount of food transported into the body is probably exactly the same, but because of the dehydration the food is processed less effectively. As customs go, most customs are typically silly and Ramadan is no exception. I can accept such silliness when people keep it to themselves, but unfortunately one sees such a sharp rise in 'policing' others that even non Muslims are now experiencing violence because they are eating at daytime in the Ramadan period. — Martijn Benders

Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That's why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness.
None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn't really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively. — Martijn Benders

Remember this: a simple pen is much more swift and much more precise than a camera. That's my advice to both beginning and experienced authors: don't write with a camera. A camera is slow. All these modern writers usually make the same mistake - they write books with a film in mind. When you read their works, you don't hear the voice of a real author, you hear that horribly cheesy Hollywood voice-over. Frankly, that's not a novel, it's a movie script. If you write books, use a pen. A pen is swift, it has tempo, you can kill people with it. You cannot kill people with a camera, you can only perhaps bore them to death with it. — Martijn Benders

I was born into a world full of 'specialists'. I'm not sure whether it's the result of our education system or just natural entropy, but it's very uncommon to know a poet with even a mediocre knowledge about art, or an artist with a good taste in poetry, and so on and on. What this really is: lack of general education in a structural sense: god knows how many people I've met that are actually PROUD about proclaiming their ignorance about another field: it is as if it signifies their 'devotion to one path' while in reality they really only look like a buffoon if you ask me. New is that I am encountering 'Literary Critics' that proudly proclaim to 'never have read any foreign poetry' as if a 'movie critic' that only has watched Dutch films would be somehow capable of criticizing them in any true sense of the word. — Martijn Benders

Almost nothing is as dull as guys who pretend to be soccer experts, they're almost as dull as the poetry ones. All this crazy talk about 'soccer strategies' its just a silly ballgame. Hardly any strategy possible. You either put 4 or 5 guys in the middle of the field, that's about it. And yet they talk about it as if it the most complex philosophical problem ever invented. — Martijn Benders

One of my hobbies is discovering Universal laws. Here's one: if you light a cigarette, the bus always comes immediately. I have tested this theory many years, its a golden rule. If you light the cigarette, the bus ALWAYS comes. — Martijn Benders

The attention for bad literature is symptomatic: they pretends its the most normal thing in the world to fill an entire newspaper page with talk about a bad book, and good books are silenced to death. This mechanism is exactly the same formula as used in the Eurovision Songfestival: to present monoculture, and the proverbial hatred for that monoculture is only ritualistic, intended to give the reader the impression that the newspaper is on their side. Its the formula of entertainment: present things the reader can feel superior to. — Martijn Benders

I have voted to legalize recreational incarnations. We should no longer jail people in a body just because they have chosen to incarnate in this dimension for fun. Are you guys with me on this one? — Martijn Benders