There is a specific kind of day when I feel like writing poems. My senses become really sharp. This day is when I feel as if I am drowning into the abandonment of death.

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.

Maybe that's why Jesus was so fond of parables: Nothing describes the indescribable like a good yarn.

You have to learn the difference between a man’s looks, and how fine he shoots. They’ve never been one and the same.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Reality also is that there are a lot of gaps, there are a lot of business in between the iconic things.

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

I can't relax here. These people have no pubic hair anywhere. We have pubic hair on the ceiling.

The less event and action there is in a scene the more I can enter into it.

Financial experts are saying we are entering a new chapter in the American economy. I believe it's Chapter 11.

Nothing feeds a hunger like a thirst