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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."

David Antin, American Poet

Music, Literary, Song

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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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"Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune."

Miguel De Cervantes, Spanish Novelist

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Aldous Huxley, English Novelist

"Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune."

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"I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and karaoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs."

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"Well my music was different in high school; I was singing about love - you know, things I don't care about anymore."

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Explore more quotes by David Antin

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

Audience, Audiences, Want

"There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation."

"I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do."

Poetry, Thought

"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."

Experience, Family

"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."

Poems, Thinking, Writing

"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."

Lie, Man, Myth, Name

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

"I reserve the right to tell shaggy dog stories or even common jokes as part of what I'm doing. I don't give a damn if half the audience walks out."

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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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