Top 62 Quotes by Rita Dove

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.