Quotes By 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.
David Antin
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.
David Antin
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.
David Antin
There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.
David Antin
My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.
David Antin
There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.
David Antin
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.
David Antin
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.
David Antin
My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.
David Antin
I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.
David Antin
I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
David Antin
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
David Antin
I have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore.
David Antin
I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.
David Antin
Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
David Antin
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.
David Antin
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.
David Antin
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.
David Antin
I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.
David Antin
I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.
David Antin
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.
David Antin
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.
David Antin
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.
David Antin
For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
David Antin
You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.
David Antin
When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
David Antin