53 Quotes by David Antin

Nobody has paid much attention to the structure of my books as books, probably because the individual works all begin in performance.

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 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.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman's idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman's idea of the real.

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 have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore.

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.

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