 Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit. |
| There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints. |
| You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible. |
| To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you. |
| Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure. |
| The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something. |
| I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer. |
| I loved to read, but I always thought that the dream was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god, it wasn't a person. |
| I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them. |
| Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry. |
| I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing. |
| 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. |
| There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry. |
