Quote

I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Poems
Send
Weak
Ready
Collection
Collections

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Image
New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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 later when I grew up, I was constantly wearing dungarees, wearing guy shirts.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to the transformatory distinctions Kingston makes between the conditions of being a prose writer and the poet, my multigenre impulses incline me to a broader transformation: to be a writer.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
No one, evidently, except me has found No Alarms poem ironical that an obsessive theme in my writing was - and has continued to be - not being able to write.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim