Yes Please

by Amy Poehler

I LIKE HARD WORK AND I DON’T LIKE PRETENDING THINGS ARE PERFECT.

have been writing my whole life: stories and plays and sketches and scripts and poems and jokes. Most feel alive. And fluid. Breathing organisms made better by the people who come into contact with them.

I’ve been told that I am “better in the room” and “prettier in person.” Both these things are not helpful when writing a book.

The doing is the thing. The talking and worrying and thinking is not the thing.

Wordsworth stuck with me when he said, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”