The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content.

Words carry oceans on their small backs.

Birth is of course violent. Menstruation is violent. Trust me, if men's penises opened up once a month and shot blood, we'd be hearing about the violence of it.

Sometimes saviors look different than you thought they would.

I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.

The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.

When someone says something dunderheaded to me about the material, it's usually a big neon sign revealing their own damage or ignorance, so my compassion kicks in.

In water, like in books—you can leave your life.

Make up stories until you find one you can live with.

Laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief

We live through sound and light—through our technologies.

A certain kind of courage is required to follow what truly calls to us

Our multiplication must increase to fill the earth. That right there, is a possession

I was born in Harlem, raised in the South Bronx, went to public school, got out of public college, went into the Army, and then I just stuck with it.

...because of forced globalization, there's a clear trend these days towards uniformity. This trend comes largely from the ever-greater concentration of power in the hands of large media groups.

I can sing, but it takes an incredible amount of work for me to sound acceptable.

When even those who should be happy by any reasonable measure are also not happy, there's got to be a serious systemic problem in humanity's culture.

The nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices, which make decisions on the basis of decisions they made in the past.

My voice is my improvisational instrument, the melody instrument. The guitar is harmonic structure. I'm not a good enough guitarist to improvise on it.

The only thing I've been concerned about is whether I could grow my heart thing enough to protect me from the harsh western Canadian winter.

I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust