I don't like crows. In the poem "C," crows are predatory, killing other birds and so forth. But in my morning walks, there were always crows, particularly at certain times of the year. And they're very aggressive, very visible and loud. They're not at all likable, but they have to be dealt with. They are part of the picture, the art in the morning. You cannot deny their reality.

What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy.

In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.

I'm nomadic. Even when I'm a visiting professor here at the City University of Hong Kong, in this campus flat, I'm constantly getting up, sitting down, picking this or that up. You can't do that and be a writer. You need to be able to sit still.

When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body.

Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.

Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.