So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven't managed that with drinking!

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

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

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

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.

The older I get, the more I feel almost beautiful.

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.

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.

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.

So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven't managed that with drinking!

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.

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

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

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

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.

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

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

Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It's not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me.

Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.

The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.

But I love New York. I used to set my alarm clock when I was there, and get up at 4am and get a coffee, just because I could.

I like my coffee light.

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.

A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.

They say you can smoke 400 cigs a day and drink 20 cups of coffee, but you can't have a line or a drink again.

I could serve coffee using my rear as a ledge.

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.

I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, 'Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.'

When traveling with someone, take large does of patience and tolerance with your morning coffee.

Americans are making coffee a bigger part of their lives, expanding attitudes and behaviors that are driving new levels of consumption.

I can't sit around having coffee. I have all these appointments, and a lot of my friends sit around having coffee talking about the jobs they didn't get.

In the morning we received some very thin coffee. For lunch we had potato soup with a few pieces of meat in it, in the evening we had a very thin meat soup with some potatoes in it.

If I asked for a cup of coffee, someone would search for the double meaning.

I was seeing everything through pain. I would roll out of bed and do my exercises. I had to do that to work out the remainder of the pain pills. I would drink coffee and go to the set and plunge myself so far into my work.

When the honour is given to that scientist personally the happiness is sweet indeed. Science is, on the whole, an informal activity, a life of shirt sleeves and coffee served in beakers.

Coffee and cigarettes, that's one of my weaknesses.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Coffee and smoking are the last great addictions.

Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

When I was 6 years old, I was in a rock band that was horrible called "Dead End." The name kind of described us. People liked us; we would go and perform at coffee houses and stuff.

Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries.

It's about avoiding reality through various escape routes that become addictions and lead to Hell. My character is addicted to television, chocolate, coffee, to her dream of her son, which has no basis in reality.