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.

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

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 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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.

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.

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