One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.

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

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

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.

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!

In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track.

This distraction is what one wants, which is very, very bad for the muse, because the muse hates not being in the line of sight. It's no longer an external conflict, like, oh, I have all these demands and I don't like them. The split is in the self. This may explain why, when I was in Santa Barbara before I went to Singapore and then now to Hong Kong, there was a writing moment when I was writing a poem a day. I had never done that before.