There's nothing cool about being self-destructive.

Since I was a child, I hated having to deal with my hair. I hated having to change my clothes. As a kid, I had a sailor shirt and the same old corduroy pants, and that's what I wanted to wear everyday.

When you do controversial work, you're going to upset a certain amount of people.

That's what artists do, that's what poets do - we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we've made in order to get to the core place where we started from.

I wrote every day. I don't think I could have written Just Kids had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.

I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.

What helps me is watching other people negotiate loss. I think about how we dropped a bomb on people in Hiroshima and 150,000 people were killed in one night. Those people had to mourn and they had to rebuild their city right away.