When someone you love dies, you get a big bowl of sadness put down in front of you, steaming hot. You can start eating now, or you can let it cool and eat it bit by bit later one. Either way, you end up eating the whole thing. There's really no way around it.

If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transfusion, given from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader. Seek after poems that live inside you, poems that move through your veins.

Good writing happens when human beings follow particular steps to take control of their sentences-to make their words do what they want them to do.

You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.

Writing becomes beautiful when it becomes specific, concrete.

It's misleading to think of writers as special creatures, word sorcerers who possess some sort of magical knowledge hidden from everyone else. Writers are ordinary people who like to write. They feel the urge to write, and they scratch that itch every chance they get.

Use your notebook to breathe in the world around you.