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.

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

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

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

The ancient Greek "oral poets" all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the muse to help them remember.

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.