I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.

I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.

How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.

Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.

We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm settled over me from inside out. What is about to happen has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one by one.

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

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