Truman Capote: None of these people have anything interesting to say, and none of them can write, not even Mr. Kerouac. What they do isn’t writing at all — it’s typing.
Ben Marcus: This, alas, would exclude many writers who believe themselves to be realistic, most notably those who seem to equate writing with operating a massive karaoke machine.
Rebecca Moore Howard: our adherence to the received definition of plagiarism blinds us to the positive value of a composing strategy which I call “patchwriting”: copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym substitutes.
Sarah Charlesworth: “unwriting” was an active undertaking, even as all the blocks of running text were literally blanked out. She called the process, “an engagement with text.” In spite of—or rather, because of—the lack of text in the work, its presence is strongly felt through the physical rendering of its absence.
Gertrude Stein: She experimented with everything in trying to describe. She tried a bit inventing words but she soon gave that up. The english language was her medium and with the english language the task was to be achieved, the problem solved. The use of fabricated words offended her, it was an escape into imitative emotionalism.
Kenneth Goldsmith: Perhaps the best authors of the future will be ones who can write the best programs with which to manipulate, parse, and distribute language-based practices.
