It's important for all writers to try to figure out what they're doing.

The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.

I could say that in the essay, as it has developed historically, success is determined by the writer's ability to express, through an individual voice, a collective experience - you are speaking individually but you are representing collectively.

I think that when you reveal things that are going to cause pain, you have rhetorical resources in poetry.

I see myself only sporadically as a teacher and consistently as a writer. Teaching is how I pay the bills...and fortunately, for my students, I can intellectualize about writing, and I can talk about it well, and I like to talk about it.

We live in a trans period. Contemporary issues of sexuality, for example - the exciting aspects of them - have to do with transgenderedness. And there's trans-nationality. There are people like me, for example. I mean, what am I? Am I Indian? Am I American? And I'm not alone in being between things.

You don't think of yourself as your external representation, or even your national origin or anything like that. You don't reduce yourself to that. That's kind of unthinkable.