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

My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path..

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..

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

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..

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..

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 ….

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 th….

I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James..

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

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

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 ….

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….

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..

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

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

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

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.