The horror of knowing someone and living with them and even thinking you're lucky and then wham and now you know that every person is really two people and how can you ever know what the other half is up to.

Maybe if everyone walked around being in touch with each other's hidden pain it could work out and even be beautiful, but it doesn't feel safe to be the only compassionate person on the planet.

I will meet you in the dirtiest city you can dream of. We will drink cocktails so sweet they pucker our cheeks, as we perch on cracked leather bar stools. I will buy you plates of calcium and protein and we will run through the streets in excellent danger.

i wanted to try things, everything, especially things that are illegal and have a faint whiff of glamour.

it just breaks / a man's heart, watching / a girl so involved with her life, / without him like that.

This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible.

I drank some coffee and my outlook improved immensely. I was ready to write some poems and, I don’t know, get drunk, run around, take my shirt off and get kicked out of someplace. You know, live a little.

If I talk about the bad old days of crystal meth for too long, I start getting like, Oh...speed...that was delicious... But in general, I don't so much. Or wait - maybe the recklessness just occurs in a different sphere so it doesn't look like bottoming out. But really - isn't trying to have a baby sort of a reckless thing to do?

I have had the occasion of coming into money and spending some recklessly, like on a purse. At this point, shopping and the spending of money on things like Botox gives me the rush I used to get copping drugs on the street. Or, making other people cop drugs for me on the street. I didn't like to do that. I wanted to protect my reputation.

There is a huge difference between writing a book, which is a private activity I engage in with myself, and wanting to engage in overly intimate personal conversations with strangers, which I pretty much never want to do.

. I used to advise writers to just write their books and it will find a home, and suddenly that didn't seem as certain. I figured it was time to act. I considered a small press through RADAR, my literary non-profit.

How do you make a girl know she's beautiful? What is the system for that, what do you show her, how do you give her a new set of eyes and turn her face back to the mirror?