“I mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing.”

You should check out William Shatner’s album The Transformed Man.

Because before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever.

It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid.

It’s financial of course, but it’s also the lifestyle choices. The more money people have the further away from each other they often want to be.

It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I’m terrible at writing overtly political poems.

I wanted to be like Spock because he was unflappable.

I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is.

Bones was a grouch but he was sympathetic. The show worked like a boy band in that way… it had characters who embodied different psychic or emotional positions and that allowed me to see a great range of things

That was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems.

I had to find a way to be more honest about what happened. And it wasn’t fun to write, even though the poems aren’t 100% autobiographical.

They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.

By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself.

There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back.

I wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him.

But it’s become very clear the past nine years that some Americans truly resent thinking before they speak.

It will alter the way you hear poetry forever. And not in a good way.

I couldn’t wait to get out of school, but once I did, I didn’t actually know what I wanted to do with myself. I don’t really know how it happened, but I just started writing music and realized that’s what I wanted to do.

It would actually feel forced or unnatural to try to do a different singing style or to try to change my sound completely.

I actually love the summer. When I went to Miami on tour, I was actually like, ‘I love this place.’

Actually, I’m happiest in Williams-Sonoma in New York. That’s a wonderful cooking store.

I wanted to be a farmer; actually, I wanted to be a horse-breeder. And I had the stallions… but then I heard Little Richard, and that was it.

Actually, only God can satisfy a Christian’s heart; man cannot.

It is better to treat an adolescent as if he had greater value than he actually shows than as if he had less and let him feel that his merits and self-respect are disregarded.

Now it has gotten a whole new leg. It has gotten a thing of being able to actually step in somebody’s reality and walk through it like they do, experience it the way they do, specifically.