David Antin
David Antin

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
David Antin

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

David Antin
David Antin

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

David Antin
David Antin

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

David Antin
David Antin

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

David Antin
David Antin

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
David Antin

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
David Antin

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

David Antin
David Antin

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

David Antin
David Antin

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
David Antin

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

David Antin
David Antin

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
David Antin

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

David Antin
David Antin

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
David Antin

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
David Antin

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
David Antin

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

David Antin
David Antin

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
David Antin

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

David Antin
David Antin

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.