David Antin Quotes
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Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
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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.
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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.
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There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.
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It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.
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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.
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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.
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I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.
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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.
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I have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore.
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For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
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There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.
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I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.
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When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
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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.
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My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.
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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.
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I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.
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I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.
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I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.