Laureate Quotes

Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.

I cannot think of a greater symbol of human resistance and courage than our Nobel laureate colleague Andrei Sakharov.

There’s plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.

What’s really funny about being National Youth Poet Laureate is that not everyone even knows it exists.

‘Birdman’ is basically ‘All About Eve’ – the 1950 comedy about rehearsal rivalries in a Broadway show, and another Best Picture laureate – reimagined as a Batman suicide mission. The movie couldn’t be actor-ier.

I began my thesis research at Harvard by working with a team in the laboratory of William N. Lipscomb, a Nobel chemistry Laureate, in 1976, on the structure of carboxypeptidase A. I did postdoctoral studies with David Blow at the MRC lab of Molecular Biology in Cambridge studying chymotrypsin.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

Laureate is a highly leveraged failing investment whose principal beneficiaries are Wall Street fat cats and billionaires – and William Jefferson Clinton.

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

In many ways, when you’re a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.

Hillary Clinton is excoriating Donald Trump over Trump University? The Clinton scandal at Laureate Education, a for-profit education chain of schools and colleges operating world-wide, including the United States, is much worse.

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.

Like many other Laureates, I have benefit immeasurably from the love and support of my wife and children.

I am honoured to join education innovators like Ms. Vicky Colbert, Dr. Madhav Chavan, and Sir Fazle Hasan Abed as the fourth WISE Prize for Education Laureate. I accept this prize on behalf of the million girls Camfed is committed to supporting through secondary education.

It is a tremendous honor to be named poet laureate, but one that I find humbling as well, because it’s the kind of thing that makes me feel like – even as it’s been bestowed upon me – I must continue to live up to what it means… Being the younger laureate in the age of social media is a new challenge.

Inspiring passion in children for books, and the world of imagination and creativity fuelled by them, is a fundamental reason for why the Children’s Laureate post exists.

The best thing about being Children’s Laureate has definitely been all the children and teens I’ve met.

Science is the quintessential international endeavour, and the sterling reputation of the Nobel awards is partly due to the widely-perceived lack of national and other biases in the selection of the laureates.

We have a disturbing cultural appetite for novelty, and it seems to me wrong each new laureate should dislodge the ideas of his or her predecessor, especially when they’re still unfolding.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

Being the Children’s Laureate has been educational, sometimes hectic, but most of all, great fun.

It’s the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

I was a subject of ridicule and lectures about the basics of crystallography. The leader of the opposition to my findings was the two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, the idol of the American Chemical Society and one of the most famous scientists in the world.

Children will come out and listen to a writer whose books they like. They don’t need a government agency or a medal that says ‘laureate’ to continue that.

The worst thing about being the laureate has been the attitude of a tiny minority of adults who haven’t liked some of the things I’m supposed to have said and who have used it as an opportunity to be verbally abusive and nasty, but I haven’t let it rule my world!

It is disappointing and embarrassing to the science profession that some Nobel Laureates would deliberately use their well deserved scientific reputations and hold themselves out as experts in other fields.

When we faced a possibility here in New York of chemical and biological attack, three days after September 11, I called in all of the experts, academic experts, Nobel Prize laureates, and doctors who had dealt with anthrax, doctors who had dealt with various forms of chemical and biological attack.

Part of my job as Children’s Laureate is to visit schools and talk about my love of books and stories and encourage them all to do it as well – to read, to write, to never be afraid of their own voice. Because we all have something to say.

I served the famous professors and scholars, and eventually they learned that the Reverend Moon is superior to them. Even Nobel laureate academics who thought they were at the center of knowledge are as nothing in front of me.

One of my main decisions when accepting the job of Children’s Laureate was that I must continue working on picture books. If I don’t write and illustrate for some time, then I begin to question who I am.

Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.

I was recently designated Tweeter Laureate of Texas, which apparently is a thing.

Once in a while, I have to pinch myself to remind myself I am Nobel laureate, but that is not part of my work plan every day.

Looking through the list of earlier Nobel laureates, I note a large number with whom I became acquainted and with whom I interacted during those years as they passed through Cambridge.

Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me personal property. I lost the remaining shreds of my anonymity, even to walk a few yards in London, Paris or Frankfurt without being stopped.

I am the son of a small and far-away nation and the other laureates have all come from different countries from all over the world and we all were equally received here with signs of sympathy.

It turns out that a Nobel is also followed by other recognitions, and perhaps the most unexpected of these is that the Japan Karate Association in Tokyo has now made me an honorary 7th-degree black belt, something that, given my athletic abilities, is even more unimaginable than being an Economic Sciences Laureate.

Being interested in other fields and meeting experts outside entertainment – whether it’s a two-hour conversation with John Nash that turns into ‘A Beautiful Mind’ or talking to people in architecture or fashion, CIA directors or Nobel laureates – has given me a better sense of which ideas feel authentic and new.

The essential principles of the three-dimensional structure of organic molecules had been correctly formulated by the first Nobel laureate in Chemistry, Jacobus van’t Hoff, as early as 1874.