I think [kids] enjoy reading, but it's a different world now. There are a lot of competitors for the imaginative attention.

The key is to get to know people and trust them to be who they are. Instead, we trust people to be who we want them to be - and when they're not, we cry.

Every day I try to do breathing exercises, meditation, and yoga. These things sound awfully cliche, but they help me slow down and try to point to a truth.

I love dogs. They live in the moment and don't care about anything except affection and food. They're loyal and happy. Humans are just too damn complicated.

I lost my virginity when I was 14. And I haven't been able to find it.

Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out, the need to be rid of something or to get in touch with something within.

I understand the self-loathing and the resentment, and the discipline that it takes to sit down in front of a typewriter or computer every single day, whether it's going well or not going well.

I may be learning guitar, but I'll never be able to sing.

I think the real heroic teachers are the ones who work with kids, like my mom and my sister do.

A dream is the mind's way of answering a question it hasn't yet figured out how to ask.

What makes me mad is arrogance, pretension, putting on airs.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Explanation is a well-dressed error.

What people regard as vanity—leaving great works, having children, acting in such a way as to prevent one's name from being forgotten—I regard as the highest expression of human dignity.

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Oh, I can spot a phoney a mile away.

I write a book of poems and then the characters won't go away so I write a play from that.

Those who desire only techniques will never understand this art. It is everything beyond that

Everything that happened to me happened by mistake. I don't believe in fate. It's luck, timing and accident.

A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.

This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.