You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.

From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.

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

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

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 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.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.