I'm not very active politically. The causes I work on offer immediate practical accessible help and politics has never meant that to me.

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect not a pleasurable memory of itself but an immediate constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel read 2 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

And yet in a culture like ours which is given to material comforts and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

A desire arises in the mind. It is satisfied immediately another comes. In the interval which separates two desires a perfect calm reigns in the mind. It is at this moment freed from all thought love or hate. Complete peace equally reigns between two mental waves.

Our object should be peace within and peace without. We want to live peacefully and maintain cordial friendly relations with our immediate neighbours and with the world at large.

As a young boy I read 'Cheaper by the Dozen' and immediately became neurotic about my use of time. It taxed me severely but only for the next 50 years. But I think it also allowed me to discipline myself to sit in the chair and be a writer where one of the most needed qualities is patience.

Patience is necessary and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.

I've spent hours and hours doing research into Appalachian folk music. My grandfather was a fiddler. There is something very immediate very simple and emotional about that music.

That was a time when I did love music I couldn't get enough of what was going on. Maybe it was Nirvana that brought me back. I guess it was a comfort because something that sounded so right - and non-commercial - had become so influential so immediately.