Everybody who's anybody longs to be a tree.

From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

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.

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

Courage has nothing to do with our determination to be great. It has to do with what we decide in that moment when we are called upon to be more.

When I was young, I was older than I am today.