If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I was nine when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, in particular, a poet. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it? — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I was writing poems as I was walking. I was able to take that restlessness, that nomadic distraction, and use that distraction… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Rather, the collapsing between act and condition, "I am" with "I do," feels like authenticity, an authenticity of being. The muse rewarded… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I'm nomadic. Even when I'm a visiting professor here at the City University of Hong Kong, in this campus flat, I'm constantly… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
[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 Copy Share Image
I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
No one, evidently, except me has found "No Alarms" poem ironical that an obsessive theme in my writing was - and has… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
It's as if I'm setting aside the husband and son, you know, the patriarchal world, for the world of the muse. This… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I think that's what, to me, also talks about the silences in my work - as a woman, a woman writer, when… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
The Chinese traditionally have revered age and longevity - I have one and hope for the other! - so, in Taipei, a… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer." — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Once you stop talking about the female body empowering itself vis-à-vis male forays or invasions or male demands or the necessity to respond to… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
![“This condition [irony] has nothing to do with writer's block, a psychological syndrome, which is one of the few I have not diagnosed for myself!” quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/977/shirley-geok-lin-lim-3190_block_this-condition-irony-has-nothing-to-do-w_2432084.jpg)
![“[Irony] has everything to do with what Tillie Olsen so powerfully imagined in her short story, "As I Stand Here Ironing" and elaborates on polemically in her 1978 book, Silences, in a chapter first delivered as a talk in 1967. As Olsen clearly saw it for women, my not being a writer was a material…” quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/2ab/shirley-geok-lin-lim-3190_being-a-woman_irony-has-everything-to-do-with-what-til_1284033.jpg)
![“[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.” quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/464/shirley-geok-lin-lim-3190_down-and_my-muse-she-s-impatient-with-me-because_3002305.jpg)
![“I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.” quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/26d/shirley-geok-lin-lim-3190_compassion_i-feel-compassionate-because-i-know-stud_214814.jpg)
