It's important for all writers to try to figure out what they're doing.

I was always a reader. In the fifth grade, I got some sort of prize for having read hundreds of books from the library.

The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.

Society imposes an identity on you because of the way you look. Your struggle as a self has to do with an identity being imposed on you that you know is not your identity.

You probably have to split yourself in various ways just in order to survive, and to think of yourself as a multitude.

I would say that when I write prose I'm a more socially responsible person. I'm much more a citizen of the world. But the instability of the poetry, the emotional jaggedness, is also me.

You don't think of yourself as your external representation, or even your national origin or anything like that. You don't reduce yourself to that. That's kind of unthinkable.

I resist thinking of myself as a teacher. I think of myself as a writer who has pulled a fast one and hoodwinked this institution into giving me a job and health insurance.

I think that when you reveal things that are going to cause pain, you have rhetorical resources in poetry.

We all think of ourselves as our subjectivity, our consciousness.

I guess knowledge alone does not equal wisdom.

Suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.

Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.

Nothing can be more painful than the cry of the word which gave us the inspiration to dream of love.

I can't wake up at all without caffeine.

Christianity does not start with an invitation we offer to Jesus, but with an invitation Jesus offers to us.

If you can explain what is happening in a church, apart from the sovereign act of God, it is not revival.

By blaming others, we fail to find the real solutions to our problems and we do not carry out our own responsibilities.

Plant medicine does not just improve symptoms; it approaches healing the whole of the body - as opposed to Western medicine, which may just approach the symptom.

I have my flaws and my issues, past and present and who knows what will happen in the future. I want people to know Im vulnerable too and each one of us is.