When I was at university, the policemen used to measure how short the women's mini-skirts were and how long guys' hair was. We were living under a government that considers people to be soldiers.

The rhythm of my body is the same as my mother tongue. It is in this rhythm where I find sanctity, that I can return to my mother who is everywhere in the universe.

Men think women should do trivial things on the margins. They think women should be merely a seasoning for a dish. I feel anger and sorrow seeing this.

Our mothers who have gone are buried in our bodies. It can be said that we were born with dead mothers in our body.

Mother does not exist, like water that has given life to a flower and then disappeared. Mothers live somewhere after giving birth to us.

I have to reach "the poetry condition" to write. Then it is as if the border around me is thinned or blurred or erased or disappeared or dead.

Women who have been disappeared by violence are howling. The voices of disappeared women are echoing. I sing with these voices.

Living in South Korea as a girl meant living under a lot of discrimination and limitation. It was the same in my university and in the Korean literary world I am involved in.

If you propose there is a feminism problem in Korea, somebody would point out that you are bringing up antiquated issues. No one acknowledges that discrimination against women is still widespread.

I came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship. The body that was broken into pieces is a sick body. I put the disease of this world and my sick body together.

Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.

The first law of success ... is concentration: to bend all the energies to one point and to go directly to that point looking neither to the right nor the left.

Ice skating is very difficult. It takes a lot of discipline and a lot of hard work. It's fun, but you are there on the ice every morning freezing and trying to do these moves and these tricks.

I'm more married to Sandy now than when we were married with the legal document. We're still married as parents.

Music is what mathematics does on a Saturday night.

It's really hard to make a living as a musician. It's almost impossible.

Christian giving is to be marked by self-sacrifice and self-forgetfuln ess, not by self-congratula tion.

[on buying a private island] Money doesn't buy you happiness, but it buys you a big enough yacht to sail right up to it.

I have learned that all you give is all you get, so give it all you got.

You look for those actors or actresses that fit the personality to populate the film.