Everyone always says that having kids is messy and sloppy. It's true, but you as a parent have to try to bring some boundaries and control over that experience, or you'd have out-of-control kids.

Most people are trying to go digital, and trying to do different things with poetry. McSweeney's is going in the opposite direction - going more classic, and retro, which is all coming back.

I was sort of obsessed about corporate people committing suicide.

Sometimes I feel like I'm on top of the world, and other mornings I feel like crap.

I can't help but go against the grain, I suppose it is in my fabric to be a rule-breaker.

I am always reading, always, and tons of things at once. I wouldn't say I'm a voracious reader, though. I never finish books that fast, because I'm always reading so many things at once.

I think my way of being "funny" is just saying things that people think but have learned not to say, whereas, I haven't learned not to say them.

There's an attraction to emotional clusters or hypocrisies or awkwardness. A desire to expose something or point at something that's already poking out.

I feel like I give myself all day long to other people and other things, and I still seem like I have something to write once in awhile. Not often, though.

I think I've always felt very isolated, and I'm sure lots of poets do.

I think e-mail and social media and all that has made me feel way less isolated than ever before.

All is changed, changed utterlyA terrible beauty is born

Mothering you is the first thing of consequence I have ever done.

What you feed will lead your life.

No business can succeed in any great degree without being properly organized.

Poetry does need a bit of ferocity. The only way to attend to the fractured world is to write a ferocious kind of music, to sing that volatility.

It's great to win, but it's also great fun just to be in the thick of any truly well and hard fought contest against opponents you respect, whatever the outcome.

To seek out in a world full of joy the one thing that is certain to give you pain, and hug it to your bosom with all your strength; that's the greatest human happiness.

Our children can achieve great things when we set high expectations for them.

I feel that it's important to fail now and again. For instance, if I go for a job and I don't get it, that makes me not a better person, but more balanced, more aware of what life is really like.

I'm still very much in the apprentice stage of writing. I read somewhere that you need to write a million words before you know what you're doing - so I'm headed that way, but I'm nowhere near there.