For me as a writer, it was understanding that we're so far behind in our way of dealing with death. We put someone in the ground, we bury them or we burn them, and then we're supposed to just move on and kind of get over it.

Where I grew up, it was all people who were black and Latino, people who look like me. Now I live in a neighborhood where very, very few people look like me.

I've learned a lot as a writer about poetry.

Sometimes you do have to laugh to keep from crying. And sometimes the world feels all right and good and kind of like it's becoming nice again around you. And you realize it, and realize how happy you are in it, and you just gotta laugh.

I pay a lot of attention to whitespace. I pay a lot of attention to the rhythm of words together.

You have those walls up all around you...Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then?

When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.