The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

Root out all the "to be" verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No "It was" or "they are" or "I am." Don't let it be, make it happen.

Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history... Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.