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“I'm not ambitious when it comes to my acting career. I'm not breaking down my agency's doors or sending out headshots. Even when I'm offered work, I always want small parts. When it comes to things that other people have written, I just don't know what I'm doing. I'm terrible at memorizing a script and reading lines. I get confused and I don't understand and it just looks fake to me. It's more difficult for me to be creative that way.”

“I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.”

“My wife is my first reader, my first line of defence I suppose. So she says, "Oh well, oh yes, it's all true." At the same time, I could have written much more about us, but I didn't want to go any further. I did cut things out. There are certain things that I wrote about her that are so gushing with praise and admiration that when I looked at those passages I realised they would be ridiculous to anybody else.”

“I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me. The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with a drink.”

“Lots of people want to have written; they don't want to write. In other words, they want to see their name on the front cover of a book and their grinning picture on the back. But this is what comes at the end of a job, not at the beginning.”

“There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy who's written a bunch of books. The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.”

“I haven't written for a few days, because I wanted first of all to think about my diary. It's an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I-nor for that matter anyone else-will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen -year -old schoolgirl. Still, what does that matter? I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.”

“I want to find a genie in a bottle that can grant me three wishes. I want to be able to speak, read, write, and understand any language ever written or spoken, just any language throughout the history of man. That would be one of my wishes from the genie, so I would have to put "multilingual" on the resume, should I ever find the genie.”

“All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff...Basically what people want to hear is: I love you, you love me, the leaves turn brown, they fell off the trees, the wind is blowing, it got cold, you went away, my heart broke, you came back, and my heart was okay...Modern music is people who can't think signing artists who can't write songs to make records for people who can't hear. Most people wouldn't know good music if it came up and bit them on the ass...If lyrics make people do things, how come we don't love each other?”

“If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen - editors, agents and publishers - whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not so high.”

“I think there's a whole book being written about it in the UK. I don't know if you can get it here. It's about all the hidden messages and meetings in this and the fact that it is about women and the fact that this cave is full of blood and all this kind of stuff. And when I was making it, I didn't make it with that specifically in mind, but I always had it in the back of mind and I thought, 'Let's just throw it in there and see what people make of it.' And people seem to be making quite a lot of it. So I don't want to spell it out or say this, that or the other.”

“[in 1998] I know my political ideas affect what I write but I've tried to follow the facts wherever they land. Every topic I've written about begins as a question. How do police departments behave? Why do bureaucracies function the way they do? What moral intuitions do people have? How do courts make their decisions? What do blacks want from the political system? I can honestly say I didn't know the answers to those questions when I began looking into them.”

“I can't relate to the idea of suicide. I guess I'm just one of those people that is always optimistic and upbeat. But one day, I sat down. I said 'You know what? Just to kind of purge myself, I want to see what its like to feel that low'. So I decided to write a suicide note. Yeah, just to kinda flush it out there and put it on a page. And I started to do this, and I had an epiphany. I'll share this with you: a suicide note that is written by somebody that is not suicidal is called an autobiography. I am on Chapter 58.”