David Antin Quotes

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

That's the bulk of my lyrical output - being confused and trying to find answers to my confusion.

I am really puzzled to understand myself.

Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished.

I don't know why I write what I write.

A lot of my songs are just posing questions, because I'm on a journey to find the answers myself.

I think of how and why and what happened and the thoughts come easily, but the answers don't.

I tend toward characters who are more lost than found.

One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, 'Right. Now I understand how this is done.'

Literature is the question minus the answer.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

I don't know what I am. And it's not important.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.

Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering.

My life was a mystery even as I lived it.

There are times I can't even figure myself out.

The roles I think about and can't stop thinking about - on the subway, when I'm riding my bike, when I'm running - are the things I connect to.

People would say to me, 'Who do you want to be as an artist?' And I would just look at them because I didn't know.

Sometimes, I'm not sure why I wind up doing some of the things I do.

I am not sultry. I don't know what I am.

All of the Flying Lotus records are exploring similar themes: These questions in my mind about what's next and what's beyond.

I've taken a look back at my body of work and tried to deduce an essence, capturing aspects that reoccur. Reflecting on your own product can be difficult yet enthralling.

I think that writing is a process that tells you what you think. You sometimes actually don't know what your opinion is until you hear yourself trying to piece it out and have it make sense to you. The process itself is so bizarre and mysterious that you never know what it's going to tell you.