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

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'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.

If you whoop and holler all the time, the players just get used to it.

Mostly you meet friends when traveling by accident, like by sitting next to them on the train, or in a restaurant, or in a holding cell.

Private citizens and companies are always seen as evil and greedy, because they want to profit. But the government picks your pocket any chance it can get, but they're never called greedy.

I used to want to be a backup singer. Not a lead singer, because I really can't sing.

Even I had no opportunity to conduct very many concerts after World War II.

I dont call myself a very good Christian, but I think I know one when I see one, and I also think I know when I dont.

All experiences come and go. What witnesses experiencing itself?

I met my old lover on the street last night, she seemed glad to see me.

You know," King said, "I'm not much good at telling stories. That sounds like a paradox, but it's not; it's the reason I write them down.

If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.