Quotes By Rita Dove

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.

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 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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.

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

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

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.

Libraries are where it all begins.

The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.

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.

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.

For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.

I write short stories, and I wrote a play.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The American Dream is a phrase we'll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we're redefining it now.