Quotes by Martijn Benders

Mensen vragen wel eens, geloof jij in God, Martinus? En dan zeg ik ja, uiteraard. Wat ik er dan niet bij vertel is dat ik ook geloof dat hij donkergroen is, inferieur aan de mens en uit op het stelen van mijn portemonnee. Want dan zit er altijd wel een slimmerik tussen die vraagt of God dan ook een hoed op heeft, en of ik hem niet met een leprechaun verwar, een schepsel waar de Nederlanders nooit een woord voor hebben uitgevonden. En ik zou niet weten wat ik daarop moet antwoorden, behalve dan dat God absoluut een hoed draagt, en zeer waarschijnlijk met een klavertje vier rondloopt, wat hij ook wel nodig heeft want ik heb helemaal geen portemonnee.

To me, quotes function as the sunscreen against a writers brilliance. As soon as I cannot stand to look at the magnificence of the acropolis of pure thought the writer managed to doll out in the cognizant chaos - I quote him, and by doing so I am discharged and freed. On the other hand, even while I do acknowledge that some things cannot be quoted, I vehemently distrust any writer whose army of quotes does not consist of impeccable warriors but the sort of bootless canon fodder that caused one to write in the first place, wishing to circumlocute that strappant lot. No writer can ever recover from bad quotes. I check the army of quotes, and if it has no sporting chance against a simple pack of butter then I will simply never ever read this person. One often hears short stories are the benchmark of great writers, but if you ask me, Id rather first look at their quotes.

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. Thats policy that makes a lot of sense for a writer.

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.

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 thats 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.

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.

What does it mean to be an open source society? What does one mean when one says one has an open mind? Open source means that its a society everybody can work on improving. It has a synergy that allows the best minds to float on top, since there is no entropical hierarchy of mediocrity - once everything stays fluid there is the odd chance for genius elements to actually lead. Such is the case now in Turkey. The protesters are a fluid synergy that have no entropical leadership, and thus the most brilliant PR moves are made by the resistance, who are opposed by the worst sort of mediocrity that is totally at odds with reality. An open mind follows a similar process, but in this case the entropy hides in the hierarchy of ideas that is implanted in the brain: once a person follows mediocre ideas - such as the idea that marriage is the meaning of life or having a job is the purpose of existence etc - then the phenomenon of the open mind becomes already impossible, for there is an internal hierarchy of entropy present that will prevent any sort of original impulse to have the meaning it truly has. Hence, the only way to escape the mediocrity of ones own mind is to allow anything to build and revise it.

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.

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.

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

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 theres 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 lets start to think, but the metafor implies a hidden desire to return to conformity immediately.

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.

After we eat of the Apple of Knowledge, however, all of us start to be aware of ourselves, and our consciousness starts to be divided from our being. We start to have an image of ourselves which blocks our true expression. How do we go from there? There are two ways of dealing with this situation. The first is to find a self-image one is comfortable with. This is what most people do. It has some advantages since it causes the mind to operate reasonably undisturbed and it brings some peace to most people. People who find and maintain a self-image they are comfortable with are generally known as ‘happy people’. It doesn’t mean a whole lot, because in fact this image they are comfortable with is completely fake. There is another road, the road of learning to get rid of all self-imagery. This is a hard road however and requires one to pretty much battle for the rest of ones life (which isn’t a bad thing at all since the sense and meaning of life are essentially to put up a good battle). One develops techniques to stop identifying with ones self-image. The more these mechanisms behind self-imagery are mastered the more easy it becomes to switch and correct ones identities. At some point we can simply get rid of the self-image and be reborn as the child we once were, but a different child who has the triumph of knowledge in his pocket.

If Lenin would have had facebook, there would never have been any Russian Revolution. He would have had five followers, a handful of friends, and hed type frantically into his own bubble. If Hitler would have had facebook, wed still be plagued by a constant stream of conspiracy sites. Damn, how lucky are we exactly that none of these geezers had facebook and meddled about with the world instead.

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, theres 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?

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)

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.

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

On the right, a brigade of trolls. On the left, squabling civil servants. Invasion of zombies. Have I managed to summarize the zeitgeist now?

I have been investigating this modern problem of decline in readership and my conclusion is that it has little to do with bad readership and a whole lot with a difference in information speed. Frankly, the modern brain is much faster than the classical brain was in how it absorbs information and novels do not reflect this development. They are simply not dense enough. Too slow, not the right tempo - bores the shit out of a modern brain! Theres the real problem: our brains have developed into different speed levels that authors cant adjust to. It has nothing whatsoever to do with quality: it has rather a whole lot to do with people claiming to be authors who are incapable of concentrating their ideas in the right sort of space, and rather smear out a few already halfbaked ideas over 30 plus pages. Hello! Do you think its weird a facebooktrained mind, capable of digesting enormous amounts of information at quick speeds, is bored shitless with that? The problem is not bad readership but rather bad authorship: authors that cannot adjust to the times. And since there are a zillion books published every day of authors that just cant keep up with the speed of the times, and criticism hardly exists anymore in modern society, it becomes simply very unattractive to read books, unless one keeps to the classics, which are books that are much more dense at essence.