Just as in you are what you eat, it is even more precise to say you are what you say, what you read, and what you write.

I do not even agree with classifying writing as 'classic' or 'contemporary'. Great writing is contemporary regardless of when it was written. It is always timely. It communicates with readers across time and space. A great piece of writing is contemporary whether written yesterday or ten centuries ago.

I have always maintained that genuine intellectuals, by definition, refuse to play any institutional games at any stage of their career or intellectual life. They can’t pretend to unsee once they see.

As our knowledge increases, so does our desire to maintain silence and hide from the world whose face is washed every morning with the blood of countless innocent people.

We both found much more truth in poems than in the rhetoric of those who write to flirt with the power of their time, or those who only speak the 'truth' once the word 'former' becomes attached to their job titles. We both believed that powerful writing is a combination of madness and reason, observation and courage.

I often struggle with every word I try to put on paper: there is always a voice within me screaming, ‘It is all useless! The world has gone totally deaf and blind!’But then another voice comes: ‘Sitting in a dark corner and closing your door and windows is also useless!’ And so, until the world decides to open its ears and its eyes, do I have any choice but to bleed on the endless snows of my blank pages?

I am writing to say something, but not because I was asked to, but because I really have something to say…I only say something when my words, like ripe fruit, can no longer hold onto the branch and must confront the hard and unforgiving ground they are about to encounter.

The role of the academy as a colonial and imperial space par excellence, which in the age globalization and corporatization of practically everything, has become the biggest enemy of knowledge and the decolonial option. In fact, the academy has become a space that instead of creating options, is doing everything in its power to deny most people options and keep itself as the only game in town.

What does it mean when language becomes the only 'home' to inhabit when all else is lost for displaced and exiled writers (and people)?