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. – 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. – David Antin
There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be. – David Antin
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. – David Antin
Stories are different every time you tell them – they allow so many possible narratives. – David Antin
You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels. – David Antin
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. – David Antin
There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation. – David Antin
When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval. – David Antin
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. – David Antin
My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn’t follow a continuous path. – David Antin
I’ve always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty. – David Antin
I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred. – David Antin
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. – David Antin
I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding. – David Antin
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. – David Antin
I’m standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I’m happy to see them go. – David Antin
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. – David Antin
My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it. – David Antin
It’s hard being a hostage in somebody else’s mouth – or a character in somebody else’s novel. – David Antin
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. – David Antin
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. – David Antin
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. – David Antin
I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember. – David Antin
The Sophists’ paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer. – David Antin
