The attention one gets from being a poet isn't great.

When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.

I have plenty of places to go, but no place to be.

I’m riding beside my best friend, and I tell him, in the same offhand tone my mother had used, That’s my grandfather’s funeral, and he looks at me as if I’m insane.

Everything we do, I’d imagine, influences everything we will do.

What I was trying to say, maybe, is that I don’t know what it is I’m capable of transforming into.

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are more creative people prone to madness? They have more than average amounts of energies and abilities to see things in a fresh and original way – then because they also have depression, I think they’re more in touch with human suffering.

OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio’s genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.

The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, The Magic Monkey – it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.

We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don’t. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone’s sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one’s around.