A Pool Game Mixes Ritual With Geometry.

Most Great Writers Suffer And Have No Idea How Good They Are. Most Bad Writers Are Very Confident. Be Willing To Be A Child And Be The Lilliputian In The World Of Gulliver, The Bat Girl In Yankee Stadium. That’s A More Fruitful Way To Be.

The Truth Is When I Went To Graduate School I Would've Said I Was Among The Least Talented Of The Students, I Was Certainly The Least Smart, Or Less Educated. But I Worked Very Hard.

I'm Bred For Farm Work, And For Such Folk, The Only A's You Get Come From Effort. Strife And Strain Are All The World Can Offer, And They Temper You Into Something Unbreakable Because Lord Knows They'll Try -- Without Let Up -- To Break You.

Childhood Was Terrifying For Me. A Kid Has No Control. You’re Three Feet Tall, Flat Broke, Unemployed, And Illiterate. Terror Snaps You Awake. You Pay Keen Attention. People Can Just Pick You Up And Move You And Put You Down.

I'd Spent Way More Years Worrying About How To Look Like A Poet -- Buying Black Clothes, Smearing On Scarlet Lipstick, Languidly Draping Myself Over Thrift-store Furniture -- Than I Had Learning How To Assemble Words In Some Discernible Order.