David Antin Quotes

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

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I reserve the right to tell shaggy dog stories or even common jokes as part of what I'm doing. I don't give a damn if half the audience walks out.

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Thinking while talking, and thinking by any means I could, which meant thinking by telling stories, came to me at pretty much the same time.

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A myth is the name of a terrible lie told by a smelly little brown person to a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars.

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There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

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While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

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My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer she thought I should be a chicken farmer.

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For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

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When I got to the reading all the work, I was reduced to being an actor in an experimental play that I'd already written. And I didn't want to be an actor.

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There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.

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I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

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I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.

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From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.

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I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.

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While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.

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The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

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I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.

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Growing up in Brooklyn in the '40s and following the war in the papers and on the radio every day, the world looked very different to us then.

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Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman's idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman's idea of the real.

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My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.

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I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.

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I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton.

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I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

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I'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go.

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I'm aware of my audience in a way, and I do try to engage with them while I'm trying to go about my business of thinking. I believe they help me by providing a focus.

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