David Antin quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by David Antin

David Antin Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from David Antin on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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