Quote

Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.

David Antin

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David Antin
Art Critic
Performance Artist
Poet
Writer
the United States of America
David Abraham Antin
David Abram Antin
Learn
Frequently
Children
Phrases
Make
Distinction
Meaningful
Sing
Sight
Singing
Saying

More quotes by David Antin

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I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
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I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
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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.
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Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
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I'm aware of my audience in a way, and I do try to engage with them while I'm trying to go about my business of thinking. I believe they help me by providing a focus.
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My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.
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I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.
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I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.
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I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know.
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It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.
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For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
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There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.
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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.
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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.
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The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.
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My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.
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My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldnt understand why I wanted to be an engineer she thought I should be a chicken farmer.
David Antin
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I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.
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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.
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You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.
David Antin