Eileen Myles

“With Instagram, you're captioning a moment. Twitter is the caption without the image. Even if it's there, the words come first.”

“If passion was a substance I would say it is dark brown, and then blood red. It's like wet grass, tons of it soaked in mud. It's warm and it stinks like shit and it's unaccountably and endlessly good. It's thick and it goes on for miles and it isn't so much deep as bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown. And then it goes. That's all you know.”

“The only job that ever really worked for me was teaching because you are your own master once you get into the room. You just have to show up on time and talk about what you care about.”

“Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.”

“I thought 'Chelsea Girls' was going to change my life.”

“When we have relationships with animals, we often make up who they are.”

“The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.”

“In my family, I'm the middle of three, and I'm like a lot of middle children. I was one of those kids that floated from group to group. I liked being able to be included in all the groups - the bad kids, the smart kids.”

“If you have a dog, and you're a person whose moods are constantly changing, there's a moment when you look at the dog, and you feel bad for them because they're attached to you, and so it's funny for the dog to vocalize those things in some ways.”

“I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff.”

“Dogs are a companion species. It's about time - you have an animal for about 15, 16 years, a generation. That time holds so much. You might have had five or six relationships with human beings but one dog.”

“Certainly in the arts, in all genres, I think that men should step away. I think men should stop writing books. I think men should stop making movies or television. Say, for 50 to 100 years.”

“The poet is like the earth's shadow. The sun moves, and the poet writes something down.”

“As a human being, I'm kind of a cheery melancholic. I have energy; I'm happy.”

“Evolution is not an even process. There are surges, and there are micromoments. Certainly a career as an artist is that way.”

“I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Reading by reading, I just kind of follow my nose.”

“Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling.”

“Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away.”

“I love Canada, and I dated someone who was Canadian a few years ago, and she brought me into a deeper understanding of the greatness of the culture.”

“The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs: you're their friend.”