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.

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.

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.

The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.

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

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

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.