“Poetry is a way for me to explore a tingly feeling, to let it play itself out, and also to map it. I feel like I’m making little star maps when I write poems.”

Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn’t saying just as carefully as for what he or she is.

The brands with which we surround ourselves prop us up, make us feel sexy and beautiful, when in reality we’re pretty dumpy creatures.

Surprise keeps the reader awake. The only alternative is to continue saying what the reader is expecting. What fun is that?

Nothing is as easy or natural as consumer brands want us to think – no problem is as resolvable. Your hair will fall out, eventually. Yet we do have these brands, and we line our shelves with them. There’s an inherent irony.

Whenever I do a comedy show I still just read poems, some of which are intentionally funny and some of which are just bizarre. The mix seems to work well.

I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they’d taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.

We just watch anything speed by. To stop and really ponder what a product label says, or the tagline on a TV commercial, might be inherently silly. Those are things that are almost designed to be thrown away.

I don’t really want to write fiction at all. I don’t see why fiction is necessary when we have real life already confusing enough.

Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they’ve forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.

After the first few readings in comedy venues I did begin to write for laughs. There’s something so gratifying about stimulating laughter.

This fixes as it were the latitude and longitude of each discovery, and enables us to place it in that part of the map of human knowledge which it ought to occupy. It likewise enables us to use it in taking bearings and distances, and in shaping our course when we go in search of new discoveries.

Leaders have to figure it out when there is no road map.

What did you do, memorize a map of the city for fun?” says Christina. “Yes,” says Will, looking puzzled. “Didn’t you?

I just think that it’s very helpful to have a map of your psyche, because when you have a map, you know where to go.

We were just looking at maps.

You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.

Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input.

My life is the road, man. I need to keep moving.