I wrote things for the school's newspaper and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

I wanted to reimagine the role in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents events preoccupations and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground poets in schools football clubs zoos.

The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there looking at art books and reading poetry.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

You know bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet and you know there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

War is not the quintessential emergency in which man has to prove himself as my generation learned at its school desks in the days of the Kaiser rather peace is the emergency in which we all have to prove ourselves.

Ninety percent of the students take the 'preferred lender.' Why? Because that's the nature of the relationship. You trust the school. The school is in a position of authority.

I know I'm not known as method. By nature I'm not a brooder. What I continue to use is a mixture of the English school which is traditionally outside-in and the more American way of working from the inside out.

Let a hundred flowers bloom let a hundred schools of thought contend.

Earth and sky woods and fields lakes and rivers the mountain and the sea are excellent schoolmasters and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

I wasn't very aware of pop music because I attended an arts school. For me it was all about jazz.

High school music teachers... nobody makes a living off it.

In middle school I really didn't have music but in high school I remember taking a lot of choir and drama.

I've been composing music all my life and if I'd been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.

I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.

From the beginning I knew intuitively that if nothing else music was safe and that nobody could tell me anything about it. Music didn't need a middleman whereas all the other things in school needed some kind of explanation.

I've studied various schools of thought... I acknowledge that some Muslims consider music prohibited but I've found a lot of evidence from the life of the Prophet to show that he allowed certainly but even encouraged music at certain times.

As a boy I'd always had an interest in theater. But the idea at my school was that drama and music were to round out the man. It wasn't what one did for a living. I got over that.

What I know is my music gets blamed for school shootings.

When I was a teenager I began to settle into school because I'd discovered the extracurricular activities that interested me: music and theater.

I worked so hard for so long - I did a lot of movies. I also worked a lot when my kids were smaller before they were in school.