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

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

When you're an immigrant, you're at the bottom of the ladder. You might not be at the bottom of the ladder economically. Those contradictions led me to feel that the role in society I was given didn't jive with my sense of myself. I think, in fact, that is the case with most people. Everybody feels themselves to be in an original relationship to creation, and feels confined by their social role.

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.

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

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.

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.