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.

Anyone can tell you that how you're raised as a child has a great deal to do with how you behave as an adult and whether you have complexes or whether you need to prove yourself or all that kind of stuff and yet the mother in a traditional family who has raised a child never makes it in the history books.

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

It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.

We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.

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 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.