Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."

The judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then.

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.

[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either. 

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.