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" You come to realize people are not simple. "

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" In life you get one take, and it's perfect. "

" I believe poetry has very little to do with memory. "

" Change is one of the only constants in Buddhism; as meditation became the way I breathed in the days, this became apparent. "

" When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. "

" I had to steel myself against this psychic devastation - to see your father on the street. It's hard enough to pick up somebody you don't know from the streets, and then to actually have other people pick your father up - it was psychically devastating. "

" In life you get one take, and it's perfect. It's strange, afterwards you might think I shouldn't have reacted that way, but that's the way you reacted. That's your take; that's all you get. "

" Our job as writers, as far as I can tell, is to attempt to express what seems inexpressible. "

" If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life. "

" Everything we do, I'd imagine, influences everything we will do. "

" On a good day I write, all day. "

" The only strategy I know of is to write every day, which I don't always do, because sometimes I just can't, for various reasons that seem out of my control. "

" I get inspired by my friends, and if a friend is a writer, that is even deeper. "

" Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are. It's not a matter of getting over anything; we have to make the best of it. "

" I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art. "

" That's the thing about a book: You're in the public life for a little bit, and then you sort of go away for a little while - several years, in my case - and then you come out again, hopefully. "

" There's this sort of male energy that we have that can seem very destructive. But it doesn't have to be. It actually can be a very positive force. "

" It takes an entire book to tell you what it was like. To see Robert De Niro play your father - it's not a simple answer. To see Julianne Moore play your mother. To see Paul Dano play you - that's an even more inscrutable question... he's amazing, he's totally amazing, but I can't really say if he's a good me or not. "

" That soldiers do terrible things during wartime should not surprise us. "

" For years before I became a father, I would try to spend as much time as I could with my friends who were parents and their kids. And I was really impressed. They all sort of managed to do it, and do it gracefully. "

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

" Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way; you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. "

" 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. "

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" I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet was saying you were kind of crazy, and I carried that around for a long time. I still kind of carry that. And I think it might be true, actually. "

" For the first few months, I was a comically inept parent. The first night home from the hospital, I held her bare body against my bare chest until a friend who was a doctor came by and asked what I was doing, and told me to put some clothes on that baby. "

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" To be honest, in my five years as an electrician, I never got the license. "