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

Consult duty not events.

That winning feeling, it's great.

With the breast-feeding, I really love the bonding. Real life is more important to me.

Quentin Tarantino is my 15-year-old son's favorite director, and by that I mean no condescension to either Tarantino or my 15-year-old son.

I'd always need a creative outlet. But sometimes, I do fantasize what my life would be like if I weren't famous.

To be unrecognizable in movies is the biggest compliment that anybody can give you.

Being single is better than being in a relationship with someone who fills your heart with doubt.

International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.

I must have played every college and university at least three times, and that goes for most of the clubs. I'd be on the road six days a week, go home and change bags, and then be gone for another six days.

You get to a point where the factual adjudication doesn't matter because there are all these other outlets that are far less responsible, all talking about the ad, some of which have a political reason for promoting it.

You know what, my faith is like this - when I die, I'm going to live with God forever and ever. But I believe He wants us to have a good life here on Earth.

It's up to each person's parents whether they think it's too frightening or too violent, how much their kids can handle, what they want to teach them, what they want to show them.

The Georgia Dome was my home field, brother. There's no question about it. I played my first football game there as an Atlanta Falcon.

I suddenly realized that comedy, for me, was just being honest, and playing it for real. I've seen so many wonderful actors who turn into creatures from another planet when they're told they are supposed to be playing comedy.

In North Germany, a troublesome ghost is bagged, and the bag emptied in some lone spot or in the garden of a neighbour against whom a grudge is entertained.

If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.

It will be difficult to break the habits of thinking Abnegation instilled in me like tugging a single thread from a complex work of embroidery. But I will find new habits new thoughts new rules. I will become something else.

Gossip is when you have a malice of intent or mindless, third-party conversation to someone about someone, something you haven't said to that someone.

The hardest thing to do is to be true to yourself, especially when everybody is watching.

Judaism is less about believing and more about belonging. It is less about what we owe. God and more about what we owe each other, because we believe God cares more about how we treat each other than about our theology.

I put music on and I drive around town.

What is a city but the people true the people are the city.

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