I would say that when I write prose I'm a more socially responsible person. I'm much more a citizen of the world. But the instability of the poetry, the emotional jaggedness, is also me.

I was always a reader. In the fifth grade, I got some sort of prize for having read hundreds of books from the library.

The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.

Society imposes an identity on you because of the way you look. Your struggle as a self has to do with an identity being imposed on you that you know is not your identity.

You probably have to split yourself in various ways just in order to survive, and to think of yourself as a multitude.

You don't think of yourself as your external representation, or even your national origin or anything like that. You don't reduce yourself to that. That's kind of unthinkable.

I resist thinking of myself as a teacher. I think of myself as a writer who has pulled a fast one and hoodwinked this institution into giving me a job and health insurance.

I think that when you reveal things that are going to cause pain, you have rhetorical resources in poetry.

We all think of ourselves as our subjectivity, our consciousness.

It's important for all writers to try to figure out what they're doing.

The greatest bloodbaths in the history of the human race were recorded in the twentieth century in countries that sought to eliminate God, worship, and faith.

Woman, the child of so many tears shall never perish.

If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

I felt I had to work even harder in order to help two sets of parents. Most of my money I send home to let my parents manage. The rest I use for living expenses in America.

We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.

Hatred was a plant of slow growth.

Wikipedia will be small, disreputable, and unimportant compared to CZ in a few more years. Uh, ;-)

If I had a gun to my head and I had to choose between theater and film I'd choose theater.

My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.