David Antin Quotes

I think the best writers use the language they use every day when they talk to friends. When we talk to each other, we tend to talk in short grabs rather than in long flowing sentences. I think that's not a bad way to write.

I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.

My style is colloquial storytelling. It's the way we tell stories to one another - it's not writerly, it's not overdone.

Always write as if you are talking to someone. It works. Don't put on any fancy phrases or accents or things you wouldn't say in real life.

I like to write in fairly everyday language - I've always tried to write lyrics that, if people would speak the words, it wouldn't sound like a song.

It's very easy to think about rhymes and just usage of words that sound good but don't mean anything. Basically, I try to put into song the way people actually talk.

Speaking in Hindi has helped me a lot as I can tell my stories with the exact idiom in which they come to me. I think it also helps the audience when I am speaking in a language that is non-elite, so to say, as my stories are also from that perspective.

You don't need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.

I don't feel like I have to use big words or theories to get my point across. People are like, "Whoa. That's crazy" and make it into this crazy thing.

Ideally, I'd like everybody to be secular.

I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.

To say that secular means irreligious implies that all the arts and sciences are irreligious, and is very like saying that all professions except that of the law are illegal.

The term 'popular culture' always used to mean what the people do - pop songs, folk songs, music in general used to live because people would sing these songs and tell these stories together. Then all of these new technologies came out and it became the work of professionals.

Write the way you talk. Naturally.

To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace—the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.

I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for people.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes.

The absence of theistic belief...

I don't believe in God. So I'm a non-believer in the non-visible. I'm a believer in us; in humans.

The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.

The American has no language, he has a dialect, slang, provincialism, accent and so forth

No more religion anymore. No more who's a Moslem and who's a Protestant.

The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.

I’m an atheist, and I believe religion is totally against human rights and women’s rights.

Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.