My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldnt understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.

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.

Our MANDATE at Blackhawk is to create mega-millionaires. Period. More wealth for our clients, more power for all of us ...the People.

If she were drowning, I'd hold her head under

The best listeners listen between the lines.

Just once in a while, let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.

I write, not for children,but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.

Society forces you to conform.

I like it [Rotterdam] much better than Amsterdam which is too much like a postcard. It's too cute for me. Rotterdam is more real, it's got a stomach.

Pure politics is merely the calculus of combinations and of chances.

The only prerequisites are past experience, a suitable personality and good communication skills: you need to be able to communicate adequately in English.

Logicians have but ill defined As rational the human mind; Reason, they say, belongs to man, But let them prove it if they can.