There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

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.

...sometimes what you go looking for isn't as important as what you leave behind.

If there is no dream, there will be no hope. If there is no hope there will be no life.

It struck him that there is a beautiful symmetry to life.

The greatness of God!

Those who know you see your tears even in the rain.

I like 1.e4 very much, but my results are better with 1.d4.

One of the things you learn in rehab is that you're responsible for your own actions.

I always try to take from past performances. You never try to get too high or too low. Just play every game, just treat every game like it's the same.

If you believe you are right, then you should believe that you can make the case that you're right. This requires you to deal with serious objections properly.

I still hope that the American system of checks and balances will ultimately prevent this man, Donald Trump, with his erratic political style, from jeopardizing our European security architecture.