I am often asked what I would be doing if I hadn't become a writer. I have long said I would probably be a chef or a garden designer or a decorator, but since recording my own books, there is no doubt in my mind that if the writing doesn't work out, voice work is what I would choose.

I have learned that it is imperative that I make time for my friends, that they demand to be as much a part of the mix as my family and my work, and perhaps more so, because they are not an inevitability.

I have a deep and passionate love of America. It is where I have always thought I would be happiest, and although I miss England desperately, I find that my heart definitely has its home over here.

In my small, coastal New England town, an hour outside New York, I know many people who have dealt with cancer. I can reel off the names of at least 15 women I know, all in their 40s.

I believe it is the flaws that make us interesting, our backgrounds, the hardships.

Just as there are moments when the words flow and it feels like the easiest job in the world, there are many more when I think I have nothing to say, and my journalism training taught me that writing is a job, that you write whether you are inspired or not, and that the only way to unlock creativity is to write through it.

Writing is a muscle that needs to be exercised every day: The more you write, the easier it becomes.

I think friendship is more important than love, but that love that grows out of friendship is the very best of all.

Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.

I rewrite a lot until I get the rhythm and story right on the page.

I don't believe there are 'struggling' readers, 'advanced' readers, or 'non' readers.

I didn't know how many independent bookstores had amazing wine lists until I toured with 'Another Brooklyn.'

I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.

I feel like once I say out loud, to the public, what I'm working on, it's never going to be an actual book. So until it's close to done, I keep pretty quiet about my next stuff!

When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, 'Instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.'

I think, even though homophobia still exists, there is much more of a dialogue and a taboo around being homophobic.

I think, as a kid, turning on the television and seeing that everyone seemed to be wealthy and white made me feel like an outsider, lesser than. I was not wealthy. I was not white.

I think there is much more queer visibility than there was when I was a kid. There is marriage, more trans visibility, and many more celebrities who are open about the sexuality. This was so not the case when I was a kid.

I think it's so important that, if I'm writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they're hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.

I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.

The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it's so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.

My mom was a big fan of Al Green... James Brown we weren't allowed to listen to, so of course I knew James Brown.

I'm fascinated by adult women who don't have close friends and how that could come to be. I think when you're a kid, the relationships are so intimate, and you're so connected to your girls, so what becomes of them? What could possibly happen to have you become an adult woman and no longer have that?

To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.