Quotes by 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 ...”

“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 stel...”

“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 co...”

“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-...”

“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 tha...”

“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 f...”

“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'.”

“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 ent...”

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

“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 ...”

“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 dimensi...”

“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 u...”

“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 bl...”

“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 he'd type frantically into his own bubble. If Hitle...”

“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...”

“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 thoug...”

“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 somethin...”

“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. Fran...”