 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. |
| You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels. |
| I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred. |
| 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. |
| I have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore. |
| 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 was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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 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. |
| 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 can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding. |
| For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting. |
| There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be. |
| When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval. |
