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

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.

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.

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

You think embracing the longing while waiting for the right man is impossible? Well obviously you didn't get the memo.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

It is an outcome of faith that nature-as she is perceptible to our five senses-takes the character of such a well formulated puzzle.

If all the world must see the world As the world the world hath seen, Then it were better for the world That the world have never been.

You're just a prayer away from a change of heart.

Obviously the actors are incredible at being the audience surrogates in this crazy universe.

Perfection is often the enemy of greatness.

All the government decisions remain and won't be altered until I get in the role and have had a chance to discuss them with my colleagues.

I don't know how to run your life. I don't know how to run your life. I don't have the authority to run your life. And the Constitution doesn't permit me to run your life.

When you think of the number of men in the world who hate each other, why, when two men love each other, does the church split?