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 i….

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 ….

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

These new theories of the universe, that there are multiple universes just bubbling up constantly - it's all pretty wild..

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, ….

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 voic….

Language itself is a mask. It's the first mask in the series of invented selves - they've come right out of language. The way you speak changes you, ….

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….

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

The sun does what it does because the earth tilts..

Historically, there are hierarchies of purity. Certain aspects of poetry are very, very pure. The lyric poem can't be anything but the lyric poem..

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..

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. T….

Genres have a history and impose a historical character upon the writer. What is interesting in the poem involves a certain kind of dramatization of ….

All ideas about identity, of course, fit perfectly into the social media wonderland we live in. They seem to really connect. There's a science-fictio….

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

We live in a trans period. Contemporary issues of sexuality, for example - the exciting aspects of them - have to do with transgenderedness. And ther….

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

I resist thinking of myself as a teacher. I think of myself as a writer who has pulled a fast one and hoodwinked this institution into giving me a jo….

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

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