The attention one gets from being a poet isn't great.
It takes an entire book to tell you what it was like. To see Robert De Niro play your father - it's not a simple answer. To see Julianne Moore play your mother. To see Paul Dano play you - that's an even more inscrutable question... he's amazing, he's totally amazing, but I can't really say if he's a good me or not.
In life you get one take, and it's perfect.
I get inspired by my friends, and if a friend is a writer, that is even deeper.
For years before I became a father, I would try to spend as much time as I could with my friends who were parents and their kids. And I was really impressed. They all sort of managed to do it, and do it gracefully.
That's the thing about a book: You're in the public life for a little bit, and then you sort of go away for a little while - several years, in my case - and then you come out again, hopefully.
There's this sort of male energy that we have that can seem very destructive. But it doesn't have to be. It actually can be a very positive force.
Change is one of the only constants in Buddhism; as meditation became the way I breathed in the days, this became apparent.
What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'
To be honest, in my five years as an electrician, I never got the license.
Our job as writers, as far as I can tell, is to attempt to express what seems inexpressible.
I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.
