I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.

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.

He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.

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

No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars - bills you've saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you've done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

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