“Suddenly we had become these people who didn’t drink anything but kale, who ended many of our conversations with tears, and for whom no future was guaranteed. It was kind of funny.”

I think something many of us grapple with are those times we dread the practice of writing, no matter the project.

Life versus Death, the absolute randomness of one’s position, privilege, and place, the lot one draws, and so on. It has made previously suspicious-seeming clichés seem more tolerable.

Love may not be all you need, but it is certainly a necessity. My desire to survive has been exponentially magnified by the fact that there is someone intimately tangled up in me who would be left alone with the world.

Me and my wife were interested in avoiding style, in eliminating voice, in getting away from the poetry logics, textures, and propulsions that we normally employ in our writing. But we arrived at even this organically and separately.

The illness has only made certain ambivalences I’d always been conscious of that much more acute.

Me and my wife had somehow finally reached a moment in which our lives made sense, in which we were comfortable in certain material ways, and in that very moment we were faced with a medical situation that could only really be resolved with death or time.

I wish the music business was a much easier thing, but you know what? Nothing easy is worth anything. So it is what it is.

We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.

I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice – anything just to get a paper bag. And I’d write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook.

Don’t be too precious or attached to anything you write. Let things be malleable.

The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.

If there’s anything a public servant hates to do it’s something for the public.

I ain’t a bit ashamed of anything.

No man does anything from a single motive.