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.

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.

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.

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

The awful penalty of success is the haunting dread of subsequent failure.

When a true purpose refuses to breathe, it suffocates to its ebb and death!

He has a profound respect for old age. Especially when it's bottled.

Just live every day like it's your last day and be the best person that you can be.

The imagination, once awakened, must and will work, and ought to work

A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity.

Great men wait for the right moment to abandon caution. The rest of us abandon it when impatience becomes too much for us.

Usually when I'm mad, I'd rather listen to angry music than soothing music - more heavy metal, some Metallica or something.

I'd probably say to my younger self, get yourself a whole collection of lawyers. Which is what I have now.

Oh, no. We can’t have that. Where you going, Mr. Meanie-Pants? You don’t hurt people then run. That’s just rude. Can the Simi barbecue him, or is he on the ‘No Simi’ eat list?” – Simi