I'm never bored.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it's fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

I accept challenges, I have always done that in writing.

My reading is extremely eclectic. Lately I've been teaching myself computer graphics, so I'm reading a lot about that. I read books of trivia, of facts.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.

Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.

Then I decided to draw from and on my own imagination, and everything came out perfect.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all.

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

I would go to sketch groups and draw. I really enjoyed the subject matter, but I wasn't good at it.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

I'm usually working on eight or 10 things at once.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

My wife used to tell me one of my best qualities was that my feet don't smell, but I remember my brother's did when we were kids.

I'm mostly influenced by life, what's around me, and my own childhood.

I'm never bored.

I always knew would be some sort of artist, but didn't know what.

In masks and gown we haunt the street and knock on doors for trick or treat tonight we are the king and queen for oh tonight its Halloween

All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class - which wasn't such a bad deal.

If people don't connect to Eric Carter's struggles, I'm sure they'll find a character in this series to connect to. That's ultimately what it's about for me.

New York is the greatest city in the world.

The reason that Americans have not been able to see the great strategic benefit that could accrue from a closer relationship with Iran is emotion.

I want the kind of career where I can move back and forth.

Have the courage to face a difficulty lest it kick you harder than you bargain for.

To be able to finish opportunities that I do get in the paint, that makes a difference.

And then she finally said yes. And we have been married, I want you to know, for 51 years.

My sisters and I can still recite Dads grilling rules Rule No. 1 Dad is in charge. Rule No. 2 Repeat Rule No. 1.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

Challenges are what make life interesting. Overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.

Broadsheets can be scathing. But I have respect for broadsheet journalists because they haven't succumbed to degrading themselves, to writing pidgin English with all these terrible colloquialisms, the phrasing of which is just, like, embarrassing.

It seems to me every one of us is doing something meaningful for this world.

Primaries are the place where you see whose message is connecting with the largest number of people.

Some people still see me as a kid, but I'm a 23-year-old woman now.

That's why we created Flipboard as a social magazine meant for an iPad, meant for a large touch-screen device. That idea of content presented beautifully, oriented around communities and special topics of interest, is really powerful.

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

You know, the reward for 'Captain America' is amazing. It's always fun to see a giant spectacle film and see the fun stuff - the special effects.

Let your own discretion be your tutor suit the action to the word the word to the action.

I've had every hair style imaginable.

Soft addictions are an alluring, seductive aspect of our culture - they are easy to attain and socially acceptable, they are even encouraged in many cases. Yet they are lethal to the spirit.

I like to get people talking. I am a provocateur, and I do like getting on Twitter and riling people up. You know what, after a while some sane dialogue and sane conclusions come of that kind of thing.

Winners embrace hard work. They love the discipline of it, the trade-off they're making to win. Losers, on the other hand, see it as punishment. And that's the difference.