Top 30 David Antin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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.”

— David Antin

4. “I’ve always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.”

— David Antin

Featured in: Strong Quotes

5. “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

6. “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

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

— David Antin

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

— David Antin

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

— David Antin

10. “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

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

— David Antin

12. “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.”

— David Antin

13. “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

14. “I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It’s hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.”

— David Antin

15. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— David Antin

17. “It’s hard being a hostage in somebody else’s mouth – or a character in somebody else’s novel.”

— David Antin

18. “My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn’t follow a continuous path.”

— David Antin

19. “I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.”

— David Antin

20. “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

21. “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.”

— David Antin

22. “I’m not sure what theory is, unless it’s the pursuit of fundamental questions.”

— David Antin

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

— David Antin

24. “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.”

— David Antin

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

— David Antin

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

— David Antin

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

— David Antin

28. “For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.”

— David Antin

29. “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.”

— David Antin

30. “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

31. “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

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

— David Antin

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

— David Antin