“I was observing somebody doing something beautifully and doing something with all of her heart. It wasn’t lost on me that that was a way of being an artist.”

“We are always fictions that we create for ourselves and others. So that gives you a different way of thinking: Like, what’s a better fiction?

“I’m not just fighting against things but I’m fighting for things as well. There’s a vision of a world that I want to grow up into, and art is giving me a glimpse of that.”

“My mother’s death was a metamorphosis for her on the bodily level, but a metamorphosis for everyone she left behind.”

“It’s hard not to write whack-ass shit if you’re afraid of looking at the parts of yourself and the people around you that you don’t want to look at.”

“It’s really almost like an oblique decision, like a decision I make with my peripheral vision, with my left hand.”

“Part of the necessary process was not imagining what was on the other side, giving up a desire to know what was on the other side.”

“Hopelessness can be the comedown on the other side of a moment of liberation where you thought everything was going to change, and you feel as if not enough did. “

“Even the most skeptical writers talk about process by using language like “the hours just flew by,” or “such and such phrase just came to me.” They’ll mine the language of the supernatural to talk about what’s happening.”

“My poems arrive at these moments and because they arrive at these moments I realize I have to live like the poems. I want to live like the work I’m making.”