I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

Don't quit. It's very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it's very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can't get fired if you don't write, and most of the time you don't get rewarded if you do. But don't quit.

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.