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.

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

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

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 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.

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

You don't think of yourself as your external representation, or even your national origin or anything like that. You don't reduce yourself to that. That's kind of unthinkable.