Laureate Quotes

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 grew up in Muenchen where my father has been a professor for pharmaceutic chemistry at the university. He had studied chemistry and medicine, having been a research student in Leipzig with Wilhelm Ostwald, the Nobel Laureate 1909. So I became familiar with the life of a scientist in a chemical laboratory quite early.

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.

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

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.

I’ve written on public matters, but I don’t understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem on the abdication of King Charles III or about the sex life of the Royals… anybody who knew my work would know I’m not a contender.

I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A drop in younger children visiting libraries is of great concern. As children’s laureate, I am passionate about the role of libraries, both in schools and in the wider community. They are unique places where children can begin their journey as readers, as well as being creative hubs.

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.

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.

Yes, I am the first Latino poet laureate in the United States. But I’m also here for everyone and from everyone. My voice is made by everyone’s voices.

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.

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

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

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

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.

We hope that the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates will help us to promote Seoul as a symbol of peace beyond war and division in order to attract global attention to peace on the Korean Peninsula.

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.

When I came to Berkeley, I met all these Nobel laureates and I got to know that they were regular people. They were very smart and very motivated and worked very hard, but they were still humans, whereas before they were kind of mythical creatures to me.

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.

I think I have met nearly all the Laureates in Economics. Among the few I haven’t met, I suppose I’d most like to meet Ronald Coase because of his legendary power to persuade his colleagues of the validity of the Coase Theorem.

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.

Waiting for me in Stockholm will be a personal assistant – Katrina from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs – as well the secretary of the Swedish Academy. They’ll help us with our things and take us to our hotel. From the moment I arrive, I’ll always be together with the other two laureates.

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.

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

When you see the poet laureate saying that every child should have read ‘Ulysses’ and that you’re just giving up on children if you think it’s elitist – does that include children with special needs or whose first language isn’t English?

I want to put the joy of creativity, of drawing every day, of having a go and being surprised at what one can achieve with just a pencil and an idea at the heart of my term as laureate. I want to make sure people have fun whilst addressing fundamental issues I care about passionately.