Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

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.

Dream while others are sleeping. Dare while others are wishing. Do while others are talking. Deliver while others are quitting.

Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.

Prayer is aligning ourselves with the purposes of God.

But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one. Men know him not, and to know not is to care not for.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.

His spear, to equal which the tallest pine Hewn on Norwegian hills to be the mast Of some great ammiral were but a wand, He walk'd with to support uneasy steps Over the burning marle.

...you need not do and be everything.

I see God through my children. I speak to God through my children. I am humbled for the blessings He has given me.

A man should be like a child with his wives, but if they need him, he should act like a man