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I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.

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
Pursuit
Questions
Unless
Theory
Sure
Fundamental
Fundamentals

More quotes by David Antin

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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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There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.
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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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It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.
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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.
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Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
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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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When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
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An art machine is a system whose parts when put in motion act upon each other in such a way as to cause you to see things differently
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Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.
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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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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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I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.
David Antin
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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.
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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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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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.
David Antin
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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.
David Antin
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My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.
David Antin
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From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.
David Antin