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

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 urge to lie is produced by the contradictions in our lives. We are made to declare love for our country, while it tramples our rights and dignity.

I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure.

Where you are in consciousness has everything to do with what you see in experience.

Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time.

When you watch the game, be a student of the game.

It's all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it's all the unformable things one wants to paint - essence.

We live in a world of guided missiles and misguided men.

I believe a personal relationship with God is healthy, but organized religion has potential for danger, in whatever faith.

A woman after my own heart. (Stryker) You’re absolutely right about that. Nothing would please me more than ripping that organ out of you and feasting on it. (Zephyra)

I prithee gentle friend, Let thy fair wisdom, not thy passions, sway In this uncivil and unjust extent Against thy peace.