Lin Quotes

Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.

Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.

Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.

Singing has nothing to do with poetry, except as twins separated at birth.

In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being.

I do not think a similar goal, to attain fame, drove me when I was a child and young woman.

Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.

That desire to reach further is also where I ended my memoir, in 1994 in California, perhaps ironically, looking out to the Pacific and back to Asia, toward the not-yet-written.

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.

Breath and brevity are sisters; the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.

"Stop Already" is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you.

There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female.

I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.

When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body.

It's as if I'm setting aside the husband and son, you know, the patriarchal world, for the world of the muse. This is the world of writing.

My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.

I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.

Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.

The consciousness of one's physical self had to be repressed because, socially, the female body was so visible, an ongoing provocation and incitement of specular curiosity and fascination.

As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was always surrounded by guys. There was this sense in which my female body was a problem.

I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant male figure as I was growing up in that home.

I always wanted to be pretty as a girl, although I believed it was not possible.

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.

I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.

I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.

I'm always resisting [my muse]. I'm resisting her power.

I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.

If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.

"Time" does not mean "occasion."

Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.

The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem is gone.

Quite a while ago, I made a conscious choice to place my teaching first, so it was very ego-invested. That decision wasn't a good thing in some ways.

In that way, I don't understand myself. It might have to do with my own conflicts, where to place my body as a child, which I have carried over to now. In this way I'm constantly dislocated.

It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.

Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list.

I had to do the academic writing. At a top research university, publishing of a certain kind is very important. So your friend is right. You can't do three things well.

I really felt neurotic - it was a neurotic reason - but I had to teach very, very well. That sucked up a lot of oxygen from my time and my creative thinking.

One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.

When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.

I'm much more comfortable in pants and shirts, running around. There was a typical construction about womanhood when I was growing up that I rejected.

When I was younger, yes, there was a part of me - and I wrote about that bit in Among the White Moon Faces - that wanted to be a boy. I wanted to be accepted by my brothers and to be their peers.

I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.

[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either.

In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last 45 years, and only rarely a writer.

I was nine when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, in particular, a poet.

Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.