In fact, sometimes traveling the world is a way of not writing a poem, but it's the quality of experience. It's being able to experience something and when you begin to write about it be able to apply the tools that you need for writing.

Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.

I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.

Everybody who's anybody longs to be a tree.

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

If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.

I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn't mean they're going to make it.