David Antin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”