It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.

Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.