Explore Quotes by David Antin

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

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

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.

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

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.

My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldnt understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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