I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.

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

I've never contended that I had a really horrible life.

I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.

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.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy--getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff--get undercut by having to play football.