I'm the kind of father I wanted my father to be. That may be the sweetest revenge.

Emotional truth is the reward of digging deeply enough to find the truth about how one really feels, but in order to convey this truth with any force, or artistry, one needs to 'create' a form of expression, and this form determines its own "genuine information".

My first sense of myself was as an artist, a painter. I would see a Van Gogh painting and just love it, the more emotional and passionate the more it attracted me.

Every artist has his or her struggle to work out in their work. The more powerful the struggle, the more persuasive the art.

Art is a crime scene in a sense, a crucible, of the mind and heart and our dreams.

To pay for my father's funeral I borrowed money from people he already owed money to. One called him a nobody. No, I said, he was a failure. You can't remember a nobody's name, that's why they're called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable.

There are real facts in my poems, but facts mixed up in the perverse stubborn stew of imagination, add a pinch or two of revenge and retribution, a dash of amplification and reparation.