To me, poetry is a recreation, a renewal of language... The subtlety of what words mean and the fact that you write something and all of a sudden you'll realize that "yes, it reaches out. It meant that, too." Then all of a sudden you'll get a rhyme and the rhyme will throw up a whole new way of looking at things. It's this relationship that you never dreamed of.

I don't really sit at the computer from scratch. I prefer to get my ideas in my fingers and I write longhand first.

I always hesitate to call myself a children's poet, and I always hesitate to call what I write for children poetry. Though a few of the verses that I've written, yes, I think they are truly poems.

A poem really does recreate the language, and that's what it has to do. A true poem, I think, has to give you that shiver. That, "yes, it's never been said quite that way before."

I don't think anything is as magical as a fairy tale experience by a child.

I've always been a morning person, and what I don't get done in the morning I really don't get done at all.

To me, poetry is a recreation, a renewal of language... The subtlety of what words mean and the fact that you write something and all of a sudden you'll realize that "yes, it reaches out. It meant that, too." Then all of a sudden you'll get a rhyme and the rhyme will throw up a whole new way of looking at things. It's this relationship that you never dreamed of.