[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.

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

The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically.

It is true that my characters have sex.

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.

Some Asian American male scholars have claimed this muse to be Guong Goong, God of Literature, and, simultaneously, although not coincidentally or triflingly, God of War, but I did not have such a gendered muse in mind then.