I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.

Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit.

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

I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.

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.

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.

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