I reserve the right to tell shaggy dog stories or even common jokes as part of what I'm doing. I don't give a damn if half the audience walks out.

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.

Give a hundred writers the same idea and you'll get a hundred different stories.

Many people who have lost jobs . . . find that this was God’s way of redirecting their lives.

Sufism, the "secret tradition, " is not available on the basis of assumptions which belong to another world, the world of intellect.

Memorial Day this year is especially important as we are reminded almost daily of the great sacrifices that the men and women of the Armed Services make to defend our way of life.

I've always been conscious of the fact that there aren't enough Irish voices on British television compared to the amount of Irish people who live there.

When someone writes a really nasty piece about me. I think they're generally untrue because I think I'm a nice person.

You're only human. Let's break free of this gravity of judgment And fly high on the wings of forgiveness.

The days passed, as they do, and life went on.

I had a very low voice for the character in the show. I said, "That's not actually my voice. That's the character's voice." I'm being such an actor.

When you are hunting elephants, don't get distracted chasing rabbits.