Writing Quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

— 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

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

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

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I was nine when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, in particular, a poet.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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

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

Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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

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

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

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

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

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

The judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

"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

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

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

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

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

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

[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

According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last…

— 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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