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.

All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself.

If you can't be free, be a mystery.

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 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.

Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.

The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.