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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
Fundamental
Fundamentals
Pursuit
Questions
Unless
Theory
Sure

More quotes by 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.
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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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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 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 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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I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
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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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Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
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I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely 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.
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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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There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.
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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 can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
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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'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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When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
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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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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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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