David Antin Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

An art machine is a system whose parts when put in motion act upon each other in such a way as to cause you to see things differently

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

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

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.

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

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

The ancient Greek "oral poets" all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the muse to help them remember.

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

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.

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

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

When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.