David Antin Quotes
"Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives."
- David Antin
(Related: Time)
"My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path."
- David Antin
(Related: Thinking)
"My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it."
- David Antin
(Related: Idea, Entertainment, Rejection)
"It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel."
- David Antin
(Related: Character, Being)
"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
(Related: Society, Future, Past, Present, Running, Self, Skin)
"You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels."
- David Antin
(Related: Money, Choice, Language)
"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
(Related: Mother, Thought)
"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
(Related: Entertainment, Greece, Public, Talk, World)
"There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation."
- David Antin
(Related: Jazz)
"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
(Related: Society, May, Right)
"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
(Related: Work, Actor, Being, Play, Reading, Want)
"When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval."
- David Antin
(Related: Mother, HusbApproval, Autobiography)
"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
(Related: Experience, Family)
"I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty."
- David Antin
(Related: Feeling, Liberty)
"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
(Related: Poetry, Music, Song, Speech)
"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
(Related: Audiences, Want)
"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
(Related: Taste)
"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
(Related: Idea, College, Kids)
"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
(Related: Lie, Man, Myth, Name)
"Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying."
- David Antin
(Related: Children, Saying, Singing)
"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
(Related: Idea, Disney, Fortune)
"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
(Related: Literary, Song)
"From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us."
- David Antin
(Related: Gods, Entertainment, Language, May)
"I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate."
- David Antin
"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
(Related: Jokes, Right)
"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
(Related: Poems, Thinking, Writing)
"I'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go."
- David Antin
(Related: Thinking)
"I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do."
- David Antin
(Related: Poetry, Thought)
"I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember."
- David Antin
(Related: Ceremony)
"I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred."
- 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
(Related: Thought, Thinking)
"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
(Related: Giving, Trying, Understanding)
"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
(Related: Poems)
"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
(Related: Business, Focus, Help, Thinking, Trying)
"I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions."
- David Antin
(Related: Pursuit, Questions, Theory)
"I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James."
- David Antin
(Related: Prose)