There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.
I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.
I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.
Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.
I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
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'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go.
My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.
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.
I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.
The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.
You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.
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.
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.
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.
When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
When I got to the reading all the work, I was reduced to being an actor in an experimental play that I'd already written. And I didn't want to be an actor.
There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.
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.
