Language itself is a mask. It's the first mask in the series of invented selves - they've come right out of language. The way you speak changes you, because when you are speaking, you are representing yourself in a certain way.

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.

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

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

I resist thinking of myself as a teacher. I think of myself as a writer who has pulled a fast one and hoodwinked this institution into giving me a job and health insurance.

We all think of ourselves as our subjectivity, our consciousness.