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

The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.

Society imposes an identity on you because of the way you look. Your struggle as a self has to do with an identity being imposed on you that you know is not your identity.

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

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 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.