While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

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.

Forgiveness makes you feel better. As soon as you forgive, you're free.

It wasn't premeditated. It was what needed to be done. So I did it.

More things in politics happen by accident or exhaustion than happen by conspiracy.

You know hearts these days are cheap.

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

People don't recognize me from gig to gig. They have no idea. But, that's really what I strive to do. I strive to stip myself down completely and build another human and become them.

There's nothing there — get rid of that!

He who sedulously attends, pointedly asks, calmly speaks, coolly answers and ceases when he has no more to say is in possession of some of the best requisites of man

I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.

I am attracted to generic or 'industrial' colours; paper bag brown, file cabinet gray, industrial green, that kind of thing.