Quotes By David Antin

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.

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

Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

I have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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