I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to reach further, to keep desiring more of a future not yet imagined and not yet written down.

The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.

Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.

When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically act.

I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere.

This condition [irony] has nothing to do with writer's block, a psychological syndrome, which is one of the few I have not diagnosed for myself!