David Antin Quotes

#1. 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.

David Antin

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

David Antin

#3. 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.

David Antin

#4. 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.

David Antin

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

David Antin

#6. I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.

David Antin

#7. 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.

David Antin

#8. 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.

David Antin

#9. Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

David Antin

#10. 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.

David Antin

#11. There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.

David Antin

#12. I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.

David Antin

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

David Antin

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

David Antin

#15. 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.

David Antin

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

David Antin

#17. 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.

David Antin

#18. 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.

David Antin

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

David Antin

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

David Antin

#21. 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.

David Antin

#22. 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.

David Antin

#23. 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.

David Antin

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

David Antin

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

David Antin

#26. For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

David Antin

#27. 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.

David Antin

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

David Antin

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

David Antin

#30. 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.

David Antin

#31. 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.

David Antin

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

David Antin

#33. 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

David Antin

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

David Antin

#35. I'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go.

David Antin

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

David Antin

#37. When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.

David Antin

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

David Antin