A myth is the name of a terrible lie told by a smelly little brown person to a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars.

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.

The secret to happiness is the journey, not the destination.

Everybody at the party is a many sided polygon....Nonagon!

Every time we've moved ahead in IBM, it was because someone was willing to take a chance, put his head on the block, and try something new.

As you get older it's more confusing. Suddenly, there's more pressure to fit in to your assigned gender.

We've got have a country.

You know, albums are a funny thing. They're not like an intellectual decision. It's a collection of your kind of musings.

This is writing. You cut out chunks of your own memories, rework them, bleed into them, breathe into the raw clay, and hope the creature lives.

I don't think about who the audience is for my books.

When I was a kid, my parents had a 900-pound television on top of a TV tray. My dad's theory was, 'Let him pull it over his head a few times, he'll learn.'

I have been a Jack Albertson fan forever.