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 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 one's 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 one's self-image. The more these mechanisms behind self-imagery are mastered the easier it becomes to switch and correct one's 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.

— 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

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

— Martijn Benders

If Lenin had 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 Hitler had had Facebook, we'd 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.

— Martijn Benders

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 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! There's the real problem: our brains have developed into different speed levels that authors can't adjust to. It has nothing whatsoever to do with quality: it has rather a 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 half baked 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 can't 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 denser at essence.

— 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

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

I know it's totally senseless to attempt to write something 'great' in a time when 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 nonexistent 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

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

— 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