We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.

If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer

I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.

My inspiration comes from everywhere, just walking down the street and I never know where it's going to come from, so I keep a notebook with me at all times and the only criteria for anything making it into that notebook is if it stops me in my tracks for even an instant, if it catches my eye or my ear and I just write it down.

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.

I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!

Poetry of all the forms of literature I think is the most suited for the digital age and for the shorter attention spans and all of that. It Twitters very easily, some lyric poems and it's very easy to zip a poem to someone, so that's one of the things I think is wonderful about poetry in the digital age.