David Antin

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. ”

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

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. ”

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

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

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

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

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

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. ”