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.

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.

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

I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.

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 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.

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