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 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..

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

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental film….

An art machine is a system whose parts when put in motion act upon each other in such a way as to cause you to see things differently.

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

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

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

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding..

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

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 p….

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 ….

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

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..

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 ….

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

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..

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 th….