Top 37 Quotes by David Antin

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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