There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

The sound of the mandolin is a very curious sound because it's cheerful and melancholy at the same time, and I think it comes from that shadow string, the double strings.

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

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

I'm a night person. My best times are midnight to six, actually.

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.

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

What writing does is to reveal.

People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.

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

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.

I always loved science. And in fact, I got a science award in high school. I mean, I loved science, but I think I loved literature more.

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.

I loved to read, but I always thought that the dream was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god, it wasn't a person.

Libraries are where it all begins.

To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.

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.

I write short stories, and I wrote a play.

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

I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

As an African-American, as a woman, I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down, never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important.

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!

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.

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

I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.

To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you.

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

My father is a chemist, my mother was a homemaker. My parents instilled in us the feeling that learning was the most exciting thing that could happen to you, and it never ends.

I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing.