I was always a reader. In the fifth grade, I got some sort of prize for having read hundreds of books from the library.

Technology is transforming everything. Who knows what it's doing, we don't really understand it.

The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.

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 would say that when I write prose I'm a more socially responsible person. I'm much more a citizen of the world. But the instability of the poetry, the emotional jaggedness, is also me.

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.