For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.

The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I'll never see it again.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street I grew up on.

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.