I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.

I was very afraid that I wouldn't be able to do this job well. And the time never came back.

I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.

I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.

I'm probably so out of it at my age that I don't know what people think.

I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.

Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

It might be a bad thing, not to know what's going on in the world. I can't say I really approve of it.

If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.

At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.

The decision for me was whether to have "The Father" be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.

When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time.

Well, one thing I'm really interested in, when I'm writing, is being accurate.

Well, "The Wellspring" was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.