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

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" I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem. "

" Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature. "

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

" Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early. "

" One definition of eternity is that we are not alone on this planet, that there are those who've gone before and those who will come, and that there is a community of spirits. "

" If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level. "

" Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit. "

" I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer. "

" I write short stories, and I wrote a play. "

" When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

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

" It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing. "

" What writing does is to reveal. "

" I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry. "

" Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely. "

" 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. "

" Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet. "

" I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on. "

" It makes me furious to hear haters of all skin colors - especially Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists - deride other people because of their different beliefs and lifestyles. "

" Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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