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

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.

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

From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.

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

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

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.

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

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 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'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 have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore.

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.

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

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

I'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go.

There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

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.

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

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

When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.

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

Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

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 can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

What I try to do for my readers is to pass on some of the things that I found out about being thirteen after doing it for forty years.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

Young people discovering their sexuality must know they walk with a strong tradition and that they are not alone. They have a right to information without being pressured.

Being a publicist is like management in a lot of ways - you're their friend, you're their mother, you're their confidante.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

I became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

It is too maddening. I've got to fly off, right now, to some devilish navy yard, three hours in a seasick steamer, and after being heartily sick, I'll have to speak three times, and then I'll be sick coming home. Still, who would not be sick for England?

I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!