“I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world ...” — Rita Dove Quote

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

You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible.

I write short stories, and I wrote a play.

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

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.

It's always crude to link Dickens back to the blacking factory where he was sent to work aged 12 when his father was imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison for bad debt, but it was obviously a huge part of him.

My family have been wool merchants since the 19th century. My first job, aged 18, was buying fabric from my father to produce and sell ties. But I was also at university in Milan.

There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five. Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.