I'm pretty good at inventing phrases- you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too...I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one's expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they'll go through anything. You read them and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students-how to write piercingly. But what on earth's the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing-you know, like the very hardest X-rays when you're writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing?

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.

At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain; the language of our sense and memory lacks the vocabulary of such pain.

if someone says they’re hurt by your actions, you must believe they’re hurt; you can’t decide for them whether or not they felt hurt in the first place.

It make one's mouth hurt to speak with such forced merriment.

It's that wounded-poet crap, that soul-pain shit, that too-much-of-a-tortured-genius-to-wash bollocks. Brush your teeth, you little bastard. You're not fucking Byron.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

If you're too overcome to even finish your sentence then you must be sincere, you must really mean what you're not saying, you must...I'm sorry. I cannot type. My fingers are crying.

You must have been traumatized beyond fucking belief

You can't think decently if you're not willing to hurt yourself

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

Sometimes a question can hurt more than an answer.

The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me.