I’m a very social person who cares deeply about my relationships. But the nightmare at the back of my mind is this idea that we're all skin bags creating these illusory personas for each other.

I was doing a lot of crying in my bathtub. And suddenly, revelation: Poe wasn’t some goofy, spooky mystery man spinning 19th-century torture fiction. Instead, all the stories were metaphors for the horrendous pain of living.

It's really easier than ever to forget that we are in a place, a specific place, and we need that place to be healthy for us to be healthy.

There’s something so strange about living in a family. Everyone’s experience is very different. And then one day you realize there are all these things you didn’t know: good and bad. And these secrets can be really unsettling and intense.

When we give this power to an algorithm, to a big company like Amazon to surveil, we become part of the machine altogether.

That is what I’m trying to write about again and again, the pull from the earth versus the enlightenment and the brand-new world we’re living in.

There’s baggage in every identity. If I only write about men, that’s unbearable and wrong. Taking on another perspective is fraught, which means you have to devise an ethics about it.

I’m trying to figure out how we can bring lies into creative nonfiction—and how it can still be the truth. So I’m experimenting with that in terms of form and content.

I’m always baffled when self-professed “rationalists” object to the supernatural claims of religion—that a virgin could give birth, that God could be three persons. Modern science contains just as much mind-bending absurdity.

What's the damn point of your writing? What are you fighting for? Bearing that in mind helps me push through the difficult parts.

In order to keep making poems, I have to tune out the static that comes from the outside world—both negative and positive noise. I need to be able to have a quiet, focused conversation with myself on the page.

Writers write, that's what we do—that's what we need to do. Writing is how I organize my experience and make sense of the world.

Comedy is a survival tactic. You can’t let the rage burn bright all the time or else you’ll burn up, too.

Without some physiological sublimation of the inert font into a living poem—whether via breath or the movement of ocular muscles along a line, fingers across Braille—the poem remains ink on a page. If a poem augurs any holiness, it begins in the body.

In a big sense, I am not bullish on America or humans in general most of the time, but I do think our job as writers is to stay curious about the species in all its paradoxes.

Life is a hotbed of failure. You miss your goals. Your relationships implode. You lose your job. You disappoint your friends, or your children. You have an experience of illness, or loss. This happens. To everybody, it happens.

You can’t register movement without stillness, you can’t register stillness without movement; they depend on each other.

Story is everywhere these days as a commodity. And that’s a betrayal of the brilliance of story. Story, if it means anything, is always changing. Story should never be convenient, or pretty, or nice.