I wonder, would I have transitioned from female to male if I was 30 years younger? Possibly. But if I had been born even 30 years later, because it seems like the technology will only get better, it seems like one might not ever need to settle down at all.

People love discovering you. The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs, you're their friend.

I was a working-class kid from Boston. But I never lost my accent because I felt like that was what I was doing. I didn't have to perform Woody Guthrie like Bob Dylan did in the '60s, I just had to make myself be Eileen Myles and let that be my shield.

I'm a poet born in the era of Andy Warhol and a generation that wanted to be famous.

Urban nature is like living with mass conditions. It sometimes feels like a myth & you are its scribe.

I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life — not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.

I always think of childhood as the inarticulate moment, and you have your little camera. You were filming it, recording it, you just didn't know how to speak it.