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.

I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.

I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you.

People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even later when I grew up, I was constantly wearing dungarees, wearing guy shirts.

I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.

The one difference I have noted is that it's made me more tender to my students and to young people particularly. It's made me mellower. I began to have a different perspective, because I may not be around much longer to be hassled by life's pressures.

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!