The lyric self is the self; the narrative self is not.

People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.

Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.

Memory is sweet. Even when it’s painful, memory is sweet.

Every time you write a poem it’s apocalyptic. You’re revealing who you really are to yourself.

While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not.

There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity.

Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.

The knowledge that it takes to write a poem gets burnt up in the writing of the poem.

Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.

Hope is oxygen to the soul, and God is the oxygen of hope.

Self-leadership always precedes team leadership.

It seems the more we know, the less we believe.

If a problem can't be solved within the frame it was conceived, the solution lies in reframing the problem.

The wise people are in New York because the foolish went there first, that's the way the wise men make a living.

I kind of thought the writers were starting to take Taylor and make her kind of down and dirty.

Depression as one example is an illness that has a chemical basis, but also is deeply embedded in cultural norms about gender, social class, race.

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it.

It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.

Begin with the end in mind. Start with the end outcome and work backwards to make your dream possible.