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.

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

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

Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.

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 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.