According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.

In this, journey, of reaching, to myself, I have had, many a, thoroughfares, goodbye affairs, reality checks, and, lovely overwhelms.

He’s looking for people he can be himself around. Aren’t we all?

Marriage converts a player into a polygamist.

I think I'm less afraid of failure than some others.

The job is to ask questions - it always was - and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

The biggest farce of man's history has been the argument that wars are fought to save civilization.

Most women are motivated so I act accordingly But this is so refreshing that it means a little more to me

No one owns you. One hundred per cent of the stock in your personal corporation belongs to you.

As a university student, I tried hard to write poems in Korean. It was at that time that I foresaw my death and the world's death. I think my poems started at that time.

Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.