I'd walk and think about my entire life. I'd find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.

In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.

I really came to literature through poetry.

I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.

Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.