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

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.

You'll let him talk you out of your dreams. That's what love does sometimes- talks you out of your dreams." "Not me, " Katie said. "Jack would talk me into my dreams.

Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.

Everybody's a dreamer.

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.

I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.

When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit.

Being a [bank] director is like being a pilot of an aircraft - it's years of boredom and seconds of terror.

In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills they have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about the little children from whom all song is gone?

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.