I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.
David Antin

It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.
David Antin

My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.
David Antin

My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.
David Antin

My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.
David Antin

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

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.
David Antin

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.
David Antin

The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.
David Antin

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

There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.
David Antin

When I got to the reading all the work, I was reduced to being an actor in an experimental play that I'd already written. And I didn't want to be an actor.
David Antin

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

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.
David Antin

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.
David Antin

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.
David Antin

You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.
David Antin