Women in Korean myths disappear after giving birth. The reason they were born is to produce sons.

My tough and grotesque images were thrown on the roads and were stepped on by my critics, and I was talked about with scorn. I felt regret that readers only seemed to like something they were accustomed to.

If you happen to live in Korea, you might always suffer from anger towards people in power, because of political and social problems. I felt gloomy under this social dictatorship. Looking back, I feel like I never saw a sunrise in Seoul.

Speaking as an outsider is the most authentic voice for a poet. Poets who have one hundred thousand or one million readers [as many South Korean poets do] might not be a real, authentic poet.

It is difficult to disturb the common usage of Korean that is bent to the perspective of a male-oriented society. Korean society is based on both a politics and history that have been disguised as a solid society of solid male poems, a solid written language, fixed rules of how to write literature, and a narrative language.

Women are foils to men. It is hard for women to take a lead role even in NGOs for political resistance.

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.