Speaking as an outsider is the most authentic voice for a poet. Poets who have one hundred thousand or one million readers [as many South Korean poets do] might not be a real, authentic poet.

The rhythm of my body is the same as my mother tongue. It is in this rhythm where I find sanctity, that I can return to my mother who is everywhere in the universe.

Men think women should do trivial things on the margins. They think women should be merely a seasoning for a dish. I feel anger and sorrow seeing this.

Our mothers who have gone are buried in our bodies. It can be said that we were born with dead mothers in our body.

Mother does not exist, like water that has given life to a flower and then disappeared. Mothers live somewhere after giving birth to us.

I have to reach "the poetry condition" to write. Then it is as if the border around me is thinned or blurred or erased or disappeared or dead.

Women who have been disappeared by violence are howling. The voices of disappeared women are echoing. I sing with these voices.

Living in South Korea as a girl meant living under a lot of discrimination and limitation. It was the same in my university and in the Korean literary world I am involved in.

If you propose there is a feminism problem in Korea, somebody would point out that you are bringing up antiquated issues. No one acknowledges that discrimination against women is still widespread.

I came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship. The body that was broken into pieces is a sick body. I put the disease of this world and my sick body together.

Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.

WHE YOU FOCUS ON HEALING AND OVERCOME A TRAGEDY OR CHANGE IN YOUR LIFE, YOU BECOME A SURVIVOR, NOT A VICTIM ANYMORE.

I am a bit of a bad boy. I have tattoos and I mess around. That's part of my image, so it's cool.

It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people.

Hip-hop is a complex music and culture that has been reduced to a one-dimensional critique. Hip-hop's messages aren't all bad. Neither are they all good.

I am beneath or above no one. When I am independent of the good or bad opinion of others, I stand strong in my own divine power.

A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.

(Home) is you in things.

Nothing else matters, except that I have fun, and I'm still having fun.

The more sparingly we make use of nonsense, the better.

Behold, now, another providence of God. A ship comes into the harbor.