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

The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.

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

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.

Historically, there are hierarchies of purity. Certain aspects of poetry are very, very pure. The lyric poem can't be anything but the lyric poem.

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