When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.

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.

Don't ever let the Man get you.

Faith is a fortified wall.

But in this world nothing is sure but death and taxes.

I'm a bad dater - I'm just not good at it. It's so weird dating in this town. It's like high school. I get a lot of people who have their publicist call my agent to ask, 'Is she dating anyone?'

Moral prejudices are the stopgaps of virtue; and, as is the case with other stopgaps, it is often more difficult to get either out or in through them than through any other part of the fence.

I went to South Africa on safari and came eye to eye with a beautiful leopard. We were so close; I was staring at him for a long time and I felt a recognition with my own nature.

I'm not into watching stuff I did last week, let alone three or four years ago.

I will free NASA from the restriction of serving primarily as a logistics agency for low-earth orbit activity.

French people do like good fighting, they like it better than anything.

We run, not because we think it is doing us good, but because we enjoy it and cannot help ourselves