I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.

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

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

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.

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.

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

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.