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.
Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.
I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
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.
I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.
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.
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.
For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
I’m standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I’m happy to see them go.
I’m not sure what theory is, unless it’s the pursuit of fundamental questions.
I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.
I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.
When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
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.
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.
It’s hard being a hostage in somebody else’s mouth – or a character in somebody else’s novel.
My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.
I’ve always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.
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.
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.
I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.