The impulse to create is merely the impulse to live—not the impulse to live well.

What have you accomplished today? What have you accompliced today?

Sometimes people make so many requests of us that we no longer feel like human beings but instead like walking task lists.

Looking for the topic sentence in this essay is like looking for an Easter egg on Halloween.

My process for writing is to write things down.

My defense: They were 50 percent off, so I got 4,700 percent more than I needed.

Sometimes when you see something a certain way, someone will come along and tell you your perceptions are wrong. Please remember you are under no obligation to alter your perceptions on this basis of another’s.

If as Foucault states the soul is a product of culture, that explains why we re-create the culture we know in those potentially revolutionary moments where we are able to remove ourselves from what “is.” Rather than creating something new, we revert to the culture we know not out of habit or because we can’t conceive of something else but because we must re-create what “was”—and in doing so re-create our souls. We are bringing our souls back into being, from the nothingness that threatens to consume them.

If the poem is going to have a chance, we must energize the paper.

I want to unfold everything and see what it—all of it—looks like flat.