Quotes By 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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 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 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.