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.

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.

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

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.

When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings.

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 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.