I don't write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.

I make a lot of expressions constantly. I'm animated.

My mom was very strict. She didn't let me watch anything rated R or anything with cussing.

I think poetry can be a kind of secular way in which people can be led to approach the difficult parts of their life, where there's been loss, where there's sadness of a deep kind. If poetry can help people to be more at ease in expressing even to themselves a lot of the darkness and pain of ordinary human existence, then it's serving some kind of cultural role, perhaps more than a cultural role, perhaps it is serving something of a spiritual role.

I was probably tall as a child, but I just stopped growing.

The sound of the headboard, that's motivation.

We don't always possess faith in the sense of having a clear embodiment of something to hang on to. The relationship between the intellect and faith is a very curious one. Sometimes the intellect can point us to faith, sometimes the intellect can stand in the way of faith. Sometimes, as St John of the Cross points out, we have to darken or blind the intellect in order to have faith.