“Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.”

“Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.”

“How do you know when an apology is true—when it means something, or can change something, or will last outside the moment?”

“I hold to fiction as a cure, or partial cure, or cause for hope, or essential distraction from the rain you wake up to, the doubts in your head, the daily desolation that you have not yet said what is most true, you have not yet crafted the story that reveals you. And therefore something waits. Therefore you must wake and you must write and you are not alone.Your fiction is with you.”

“You obsess (but of course you obsess) until the joy is gone from that thing you'd loved, until your fury overwhelms your passion, until you no longer know how to sit with your back against a tree and write poetry that no one will ever see.”

“You know how a river goes on and on? That's my love for you.”

“I’d have given any- thing to know how Mom and Dad were, but you can’t ask your parents such questions. You have to wait for them to tell you what it is that will happen next...”