Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.

To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world--that I am able to change it in positive ways.

Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.

...I've learned exactly who the enemy are. I easily recognize them-business-suited in their modern American executive guise, each boss two feet taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye.

Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, TV dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts.