Words matter. These are the best David Antin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When I got to the reading all the work, I was reduced to being an actor in an experimental play that I’d already written. And I didn’t want to be an actor.
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.
There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.
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.
My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.
When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.
I’m standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I’m happy to see them go.
It’s hard being a hostage in somebody else’s mouth – or a character in somebody else’s novel.
The Sophists’ paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.
I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
I’m not sure what theory is, unless it’s the pursuit of fundamental questions.
For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.
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.
Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.
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.
From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It’s hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
Stories are different every time you tell them – they allow so many possible narratives.
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 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.
