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.

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.

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

For me the greatest beauty always lies in the greatest clarity.

Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.

When you take a pitch and line it somewhere, it's like you've thought of something and put it there with beautiful clarity.

You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare.

They place great stress on the clarity of our language for expressing nuances and showing subtleties.

When I speak of the beauty of a game of chess, then naturally this is subjective. Beauty can be found in a very technical, mathematical game for example. That is the beauty of clarity.

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

As I began to discover my own truth and endeavored to possess it with clarity, I became more and more alienated from that which my companions held, or professed to hold.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

Your mind, while blessed with permanent memory, is cursed with lousy recall. Written goals provide clarity. By documenting your dreams, you must think about the process of achieving them.

The two most important things that can be done to promote democracy in the world is first, to bring moral clarity back to world affairs and second, to link international policies to the advance of democracy around the globe.

Clarity affords focus.

What will become compellingly important is absolute clarity of shared purpose and set of principles of conduct sort of institutional genetic code that every member of the organization understands in a common way, and with deep conviction.

Clarity is the counterbalance of profound thoughts.

And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something.

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!