“I wish it were that simple, that I could have a guidepost, or model, or scale against which to measure each work…”
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“These characters are in the scene and they're talking to each other, and you're reading it, and you're reconstructing something in your head. You're imagining it. You are reimagining it, and it's not a dream.”
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 “I think you can write about the personal sublime and still be in the socio-political world. I'd like American poets to be more involved.”
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“I'm not subtle. The violent impulses in my fiction are pretty much laid out on the table. I crave the opportunity to let out in fiction some of the dark thoughts that are not as accessible in a regular conversation.”
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“…the greedy soul will eat up everything. It'll destroy a hundred universes for the sake of a little attention—the flutter of an eyelash.”
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“William Carlos Williams said that a successful poet is one who writes a successful poem. That's it—it's hard to keep going on that alone, but many have to.”
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“…people want established writers to notice them because they think it might be some kind of touch from a world they can then enter…”
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“A book can’t be good if it’s popular. That’s as much crap as saying a book can’t be good if it’s unpopular. Popularity is no determinant of quality. ”
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“All the original violence of the American project is still vibrating…in a big bang sort of way…. It makes sense that pattern would show up in my stories.”
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“You know, making art and experiencing art are both pretty radical,
because, in the end, art is about humanization, empathy, and even trust.”
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 “Stories make the chaos understandable by arranging it along a timeline. But linear narration is only one way to perceive reality.”
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“I’m interested in contradiction. I’m interested in saying something and then unsaying it.”
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“I love not knowing things and that is at the heart of being a poet.”
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 “It's no accident that it's easier to write a curse poem than a praise poem. I mean a good curse poem.”
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“Some things you can only see what's wrong with them—… Or sometimes you go back and go, Wow, how did I do that? It looks like I have a brain!”
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“I came to writing…because I had a story to tell—a story that simply would not be denied and wasn't going away anytime soon.”
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“I love good sentences. I have a lust for a good sentence as a reader and a writer.”
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“I go with the story that needs to be told…. I don't worry about my stories having to represent a certain viewpoint, a certain belief, a certain anything.”
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“I'm just too used to getting below the surface of things. My narrative point of view is always deep, close inside the complexity of people's minds.”
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“One does not necessarily need to carry the banner of each trauma in the world to at least remain cognizant that suffering which plagues us all is really in large part a product of the abstraction of some people’s humanity and not others’. ”
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“Eventually, nonfiction began to wear out. I must have written every anecdote in my life at least once. I wrote that material to death.”
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“Poetry in our complex society connects us to lyrical tension that has everything to do with discovery and the act of becoming.”
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“Of course I'm interested in some kind of communication, a speaking and a listening, between the human and non-human. I think we really are restricted in our knowledge by being only human.”
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“I’m a poet of personal witness. I know there’s a lot of feeling out there that the ‘I’ is dead and the reader is a void, but I feel I’m talking to somebody.”
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“I prefer the term ‘literary nonfiction.’ Creativity is such a strange thing, as though people would intentionally write uncreatively…”
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“For the people in my fiction, it’s
baby steps all the way through, across tenuous ground. They’re trying to
make it across somehow, without getting more damaged along the way.”
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“I don't want to be one of those writers who gets wrapped up in tangled sheets.”
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“I write sonnets and I embalm.”
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“That's the thing about poetry with me. I can't get out of it. I know people who write from different perspectives, you know, who write persona poems, but I think the subtext to all poems — the really good ones — is that the author is the speaker.”
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“I think books should have an agenda, but I don’t think you should
be able to deliver a one-liner about what that agenda is. It should be an
agenda felt by the reader, sensed by the reader, but not fully known.”
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“I think bad writing has an agenda. It’s polemical oftentimes—makes a point, delivers a message, offers counsel or advice about something. For me, good writing is tentative.”
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 “I can't see the characters in the novel as without hope. Their situations are desperate, but writing about such characters fires me because they make me feel like my writing matters.”
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“I feel there is a great deal of highly conventional thinking in almost every area of life that must be discarded in order for a writer to make something with integrity.”
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“Most of the time, if you think about them in adjacent rooms,
the door adjoining suffering and humor is very often wide open, but as we get closer and closer to suffering, the doorway
gets smaller and smaller, because you can’t stand it otherwise.”
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“After a certain point, you have to have
the strength and character and belief to be a writer. Images aren’t going
to save you from yourself. Beyond craft issues, you have to start wrestling
with why you are who you are.”
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 “I’m interested in knowing the deepest secrets that connect human beings.”
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“You read between the lines and discover what the character and personality of another writer is, and say, 'I like that guy. He's human. He's on the same wavelength.'”
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“I had always wanted to be a writer, but by virtue of always wanting to be a writer I became very frightened of it because it meant so much to me.”
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“Writers are both incredibly arrogant and insecure, simultaneously, and those two things are so close, really.”
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“If you decided to become a literary writer by going into journalism and then ghostwriting and then writing mysteries, that’s the worst path you could take. I like to say I’ve taken the service entrance into literary fiction. ”
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“If you read lots of great poetry, you'll be a better person for it, though if you're a shit, you'll probably still be a shit. Albeit a well-read, or a more interesting one at literary soirees.”
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“Almost everything I’m interested in is dialectical; that’s where the tension in our lives is, where the tension in our art is. There’s all this absurdity around us, but there’s also the truly hideous.”
“I love plot, but approaching plot as plot doesn’t work for me. I like to fall into plot, write until I figure out what the plot is. The plots create themselves, rather than me creating them.”
