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.

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

Human relationships are binary: they are complete and fully loving when both people are authentic or they are not at all.

Rejected by man, yet accepted by the Maker.

Famous people feel that they must perpetually be on the crest of the wave, not realising that it is against all the rules of life. You can't be on top all the time, it isn't natural.

As a person you want to be respected. Respect is always important to me.

Only as we bow in contrition, confession, and repentance at the foot of the cross, can we find forgiveness. There is the grace of God.

I'm really only interested in technology that is about pictures. I'm interested in anything that makes a picture.

Kiss is a Fourth of July fireworks show with a backbeat.

People are always talking about originality, but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us, and this goes on to the end.

Westerns are closer to art than anything else in the motion picture business.