I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.

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.

In hindsight, events seem logical

Have you no wish for others to be saved? Then you're not saved yourself, be sure of that!

Moral maturity and freedom require more than mere adherence to the law

Life, in all its uniqueness, would not be life without the negatives and the positives.

Well, boys, it's a round ball and a round bat and you got to hit the ball square.

Sound is the first thing that we tune into.

Every US President has to have a war.

When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

American democracy is supposed to be the paradigm for the rest of the world.

I hope the World War II generation doesn't lose that quality that made them so appealing: their modesty, and the way they are always looking forward and seldom back.