David Antin Quotes

38 quotes in 587 categories

• Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
• My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.
• It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.
• 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…
• 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.
• Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.
• From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.
• 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…
• 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 hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
• I have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore.
• My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.
• My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldnt understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.
• There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.
• You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.

Browse David Antin Quotes by Category