Quotes from David Antin

My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.

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.

When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.

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

I'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go.

There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.

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.

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

A myth is the name of a terrible lie told by a smelly little brown person to a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars.

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.

It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.

I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.

I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.

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

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.

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.