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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The holiness of the gospel softens the hardness of the heart.

The music of memory has its own pitch, /which not everyone hears.

Life is nothing but an empty space filled with memories from beginning to end.

Respect is like a bridge to reach your Love. If you do not respect, love is lost.

That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.

I'm in a great place because I trust people behind the camera as I go off, and I still go back to my day job and do film.

I first started using the internet back when a 14.4 modem was considered fast. I think I was about 11 or 12, and it fascinated me that you could look at all these different things on your computer.

A significant inventionmust be startling, unexpected. It must come to a world that is not prepared for it.

I am not faithful but I am attached.

When people flatter you constantly it is very tempting to think you deserve it.