The attention one gets from being a poet isnt great..

I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet wa….

Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink..

Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are. It's not a matter of getting over anything; we have to make the best of….

On a good day I write, all day..

Perhaps everyone has a story that could break your heart..

inside us, a flower taken whole, a field built inside..

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are mo….

In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You ….

What you fear your whole life comes to pass. You end up living toward it, you spend your life running from it but your foot is nailed to the sidewalk….

Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?.

Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they….

By the time I make my way to the border of Mauritania, to the edge of the Sahara, I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply f….

By the time I'm nine I know the world is a dangerous place. I've heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family. B….

I get inspired by my friends, and if a friend is a writer, that is even deeper..

In life you get one take, and it's perfect. It's strange, afterwards you might think I shouldn't have reacted that way, but that's the way you reacte….

Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save….

Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A fut….

We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don't. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning w….

If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life..

There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, w….