Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.

I think Walt Whitman went to the help wanted section and found a squib that said Wanted: National Poet. And he was innocent enough to believe there really was such a job. And if he could just write a poem that incorporated everything he felt and suspected and hoped for from America that he would have the position.

Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.

Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events.

You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know.

There's a kind of ear music . . . a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page.

You know, right often, the body is the best thing we’ve got going for us. A body itself is a shiny object. Something!

Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

Writing is a kind of free fall that you then go back and edit and shape.