If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.

Libraries are where it all begins.

Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.

The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.

What writing does is to reveal.

All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself.

For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.

Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

My father is a chemist, my mother was a homemaker. My parents instilled in us the feeling that learning was the most exciting thing that could happen to you, and it never ends.

One definition of eternity is that we are not alone on this planet, that there are those who've gone before and those who will come, and that there is a community of spirits.

People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.

The American Dream is a phrase we'll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we're redefining it now.