You probably have to split yourself in various ways just in order to survive, and to think of yourself as a multitude.

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.

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.

The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.

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

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.

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