My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.

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 reason why nothing happens is because nothing was done. Something will happen when something is done. Leaders take actions!

Give me honorable enemies rather than ambitious ones, and I'll sleep more easily by night.

Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

I started to like my voice - the sound of it. So then I started to listen to it as something separate. To me, it sounded good that way as well.

I have been blessed by having, and I admittedly am biased, some of the smartest, hardest-working, and good people in my administration that I think any president has ever had.

The real secret of happiness is simply this: to be willing to live and let live, and to know very clearly in one's own mind that the unpardonable sin is to be an unpleasant person.

What can God do for a liar who refuses to repent? Can the Lord save him? He can’t claim salvation. Baptizing him in water will not settle the trouble, unless you keep him under.

I don't have a philosophy. I have an instinct. I accept stuff that I like.

One thing I've learned is that I'm not the owner of my talent; I'm the manager of it.

Progress in thought is the assertion of individualism against authority.