“Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable—like I'm about to cry any second—and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.”

“But I'd run two miles and when I stepped inside our cool, dark house, I yelled up the stairs to Mom, "I ran two miles with Daddy, Mom! I'm strong! I'm strong!" And I punched the wall and could feel the plaster and lath behind the wallpaper, though I had no words for them.”

“One of the things I tell the writers with whom I work is, man, when you finish a draft of a poem, or short story or novel, you make sure you go out and celebrate all night long because whether the world ever notices or not, whether you get it published or not, you did something most people never do: You started, stuck with, and finished a creative work. And that is a triumph. That is something to celebrate. All the stuff that I'm talking about is really from the point of view of trying to create art—and I don't mean to sound highfalutin when I bring the word "art" in. All I mean is, a work that seeks to illuminate truth in whatever way possible.”

“Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.”

“And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.”

“One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.”

“And that's what I wanted: obliteration. Decimation. Just an instant smear of me right out of all this rising and falling and nothing changing that feels like living.”