When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.

The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

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.

One arrives at a recognition that one needs to be distracted.

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

Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.

I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.