In publishing books and winning awards, it's like you've enjoyed this meal, you know, two months ago. How long can you be nourished by thinking about it? You've already ingested it, and you've excreted it, and that was two months ago. You had this fabulous meal. It's not going to keep you satiated today. You have to go out and get your next meal. For me, that's writing. I have to go out and hunt my next meal.

[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either. 

I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you.

One arrives at a recognition that one needs to be distracted.

I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list.