People think they're gonna make a living off poetry. Ten years ago, maybe a couple of people did. Right now, no one, I don't think.

I don't know if enjoy is the right word for alcohol. I like to drink, but I don't like enforced social drinking. When I don't wanna drink, I don't wanna drink. I haven't had a desire to drink for four months. When I think of the taste of it, no desire. The trouble is the wines I love I can barely afford, which is a great method to cut down on your drinking: Drink only what you can't afford.

Johnny Depp is, to me, a rare kindred spirit with like sensibilities, who has escaped the beast. He's probably one of the few people that have survived Los Angeles as a human being.

My father, God bless him, thought it was such an impossible desire to be able to make a living the way I do. I was destined to go into the bar business like him or go to college and be a lawyer. I was not encouraged, and in a way maybe that made me more hardheadedly committed to being a writer.

The older you get, the more you live with ghosts.

I don't have a college degree.

The things I wanted to be when I was a kid were an archeologist, because of dinosaur bones; a garbage man, because they got to ride on the side of the trucks; and a writer.