Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Poetics is a science for stammering poets.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

You need to be distracted.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Time" does not mean "occasion.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

It is true that my characters have sex.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Breath and brevity are sisters; the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The crows live in the world like you do. They are part of nature.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I do want to do the entire alphabet. There's in [Walker's Alphabet] a poem called "A Life" in that grouping. I was…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I had to do the academic writing. At a top research university, publishing of a certain kind is very important. So your…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

This condition [irony] has nothing to do with writer's block, a psychological syndrome, which is one of the few I have not…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I was walking every morning, and I'd take my iPod and paper and pen. As I walked, I wrote a poem, and then…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In short, for me - I'm kind of projecting onto you - distraction has become a modus vivendi, a way of life.…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Emerging into writership, I have plans to discover my other themes, of nation and country, love and conflict, the body and transcendence,…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In Sister Swing, the two sisters have boyfriends and they go to bed with them, but the descriptions are not graphic. They're…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The one difference I have noted is that it's made me more tender to my students and to young people particularly. It's…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In publishing books and winning awards, it's like you've enjoyed this meal, you know, two months ago. How long can you be…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

As a first-generation "Asian American woman," for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an "Asian American woman." Within…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

When you're a female poet, would you, therefore, invoke a male muse? When nuns get consecrated into their vocations, they become brides…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

This distraction is what one wants, which is very, very bad for the muse, because the muse hates not being in the…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

[Irony] has everything to do with what Tillie Olsen so powerfully imagined in her short story, "As I Stand Here Ironing" and…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Singing has nothing to do with poetry, except as twins separated at birth.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I had a couple of Asian readers and other folks tell me, "Oh, you have a lot of sex in your writing."

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim