David Byrne: You're never going to reach other people.
Mary Oliver: Absolutely. I'm very easy with that.
Byrne: They self-mythologize. It never ends well.
Oliver: I'm here for three days, could I take you to lunch?
Byrne: I’m afraid I’m probably not the one to ask. The audience is not there for that.
Oliver: Well, that's why I wanted to be invisible, I'm sure.
Byrne: Hmm. Wow.
Oliver: It's true.
Byrne: You never know.
Oliver: I don't know.
Byrne: It's easy to imagine. There's still plenty of mystery.
Oliver: I went to the dump to gather up old shingles, my usual routine, and one fellow who saw me said, "Didn't I see you on television last night?"
Byrne: It was really about his golf game.
Oliver: It was bad, it was derivative.
Byrne: It's a social thing. Some of it is very tedious, and some of it is really wonderful, but it’s very obviously theatrical.
Oliver: Yes. I was very, very lonely.
Byrne: That's incredible. You can push that form, but kind of from inside the genre.
Oliver: When you can't help but go there. I used up a lot of pencils.
Byrne: It doesn’t appear to be naturalistic in any way, shape or form.
Oliver: It excites me. To me, it's all right if you look at a tree, as the Hindus do, and say the tree has a spirit.
Byrne: It's the other way around.
Oliver: Well.