Quote

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

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
Write
Writing
Reply
Note
Performing
Notes
Nine
Since

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Image
My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: I want, I want, I want!9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.
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
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!
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis is therefore poetics.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.
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
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
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
Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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 is gone.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.
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 the poem C, the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim