David Antin

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

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.

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

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

The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.

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.

It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.

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

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

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

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

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

I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.

I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

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.

My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.

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.

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.