Top 100 Billy Collins Quotes
#1. But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.
Billy Collins
#2. When you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet's decision, it becomes the device's decision.
Billy Collins
#3. All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.
Billy Collins
#4. So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
Billy Collins
#5. More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree - a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.
Billy Collins
#6. I learned snails don't have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence.
Billy Collins
#7. Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.
Billy Collins
#8. It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
Billy Collins
#9. Pleasure, of course, is a slippery word ... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source.
Billy Collins
#10. The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.
Billy Collins
#11. I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies, and Loony Tunes cartoons.
Billy Collins
#12. I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.
Billy Collins
#13. The really authentic thing about humor is that anyone can pretend to be serious. Anyone who's ever had a job - in fact, we're pretending to be serious now, more or less.
Billy Collins
#14. You'll find i-poetry, you'll find that you can download poetry, that you can stuff your i-pod with recorded poetry. So just to answer the question that way, I think that poetry is gonna catch up with that technology quite soon.
Billy Collins
#15. Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.
I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.
Billy Collins
#16. I'm easily frightened, and I've also come to realize that old Catholic guilt or remorse is easily stimulated.
Billy Collins
#17. I don't write for an auditorium full of people. I don't write for the microphone; I write for the page.
Billy Collins
#18. And strangely enoughthe only emotion I ever feel, is what the beaver must feel, as he bears each stick to his hidden construction, which creates the tranquil pond and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle, and the pair of swans a place to conceal their young
Billy Collins
#19. There's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can't pretend to be funny.
Billy Collins
#20. But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.
Billy Collins
#21. I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
Billy Collins
#22. A long time ago when cataclysms were common
as sneezes and land masses slid
around the globe looking for places
to settle down and become continents,
someone introduced us at a party.
Billy Collins
#23. I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.
Billy Collins
#24. Poems are perfect for something to listen to while you're walking around because they don't take very long.
Billy Collins
#25. One burst after another as my wife turned in her sleep. I was a single monkey trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet,
Billy Collins
#26. Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness.
Billy Collins
#27. It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
Billy Collins
#28. Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.
Billy Collins
#29. I can see one of them clearly now, walking
along with a newspaper tucked under his arm.
he has cut himself shaving and a bit of tissue
with a circle of blood is stuck to his cheek,
Billy Collins
#30. ... balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
Billy Collins
#31. I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we're drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.
Billy Collins
#32. I had to send away for the
beacuse they are not available in any store.
They look the same as any sunglasses
with a light tint and silvery frames,
but instead of filtering out the harmful
rays of the sun.
they filter out the harmful sight of you
Billy Collins
#33. When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
Billy Collins
#34. I always think [W.S.] Merwin's poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin. My poems could easily evaporate. So I don't know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something.
Billy Collins
#35. I think it's good not to make demands on the reader too early. But as the poem goes on, I want the journey of the poem to lead into some interesting places.
Billy Collins
#36. The life of Edward Estlin Cummings began with a childhood in Cambridge, Mass., that he described as happy, but he struggled in both his artistic and romantic exploits against the piousness of his father, an esteemed Harvard professor.
Billy Collins
#37. If an artist is driven primarily by social responsibility, I think the art probably suffers because, again, just as leadership has a rather defined end point or purpose, social responsibility would seem to have a very clear moral context.
Billy Collins
#38. A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I'm locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem.
Billy Collins
#39. I don't want to sound like an aesthete, but one has to be true to the art. And that means being true to the tradition of the art but also being true to your own artistic vision.
Billy Collins
#40. Vade Mecum
I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.
Billy Collins
#41. While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
Billy Collins
#42. I'll listen to anything authentic whether it's bluegrass or gospel or blues.
Billy Collins
#43. After counting all the sheep in the world
I enumerate the wildebeests, snails,
camels, skylarks, etc.,
then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,
country by country.
By early light I am asleep
in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood,
Billy Collins
#44. A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
Billy Collins
#45. Listeners are kind of ambushed ... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.
Billy Collins
#46. I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one's interested in the experiences of a stranger - let's put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.
Billy Collins
#47. Emily Dickinson seems rather tame because she pretty much uses the same meter every time. It's called 'common meter.' It's a line of four beats that's followed by a line of three beats.
Billy Collins
#48. I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.
Billy Collins
#49. The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.
Billy Collins
#50. Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results in all cases. And the poem, if it's written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed.
Billy Collins
#51. You trip over a word while carrying
a tray of vocabulary out to the pool
only to discover that broken glass
is a good topic.
Billy Collins
#52. I feel like the secretary to the morning whose only/
responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation/
until it's time to go to lunch with the other girls,/
all of us ordering the cottage cheese with half a pear.
Billy Collins
#53. Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.
Billy Collins
#54. I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.'
Billy Collins
#55. When I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand.
Billy Collins
#56. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with.
Billy Collins
#57. This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore ...
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle
... too much to name, too much to think about.
Billy Collins
#58. I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.
Billy Collins
#59. I really have a distaste for poets who announce themselves at 50 yards; you know, here he comes, you know, with the beret and the cane and the cape and the whatever - whatever mishegas is part of the outfit there.
Billy Collins
#60. One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
Billy Collins
#61. The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else.
Billy Collins
#62. Cummings' career as a writer - and a painter - was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten.
Billy Collins
#63. Besides the aesthetics, besides teaching an appreciation of T.S. Eliot, a basic need is fulfilled when you teach English at CUNY.
Billy Collins
#64. The dog (the poet) is on top of a locomotive," ... "He's got a box full of track, and he's frenetically laying down track in front of the train.
Billy Collins
#65. It seems only yesterday that I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.
Billy Collins
#66. The obituaries shot up to the top of my list when I discovered Robert McG. Thomas, the 'Times' obit writer who redesigned its traditional form and added a measure of stylistic elegance.
Billy Collins
#67. The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
Billy Collins
#68. I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
Billy Collins
#69. There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
Billy Collins
#70. I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.
Billy Collins
#71. Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
Billy Collins
#72. I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.
Billy Collins
#73. A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori.'
Billy Collins
#75. If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.
Billy Collins
#76. Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is that it's always your turn - I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it's under way, there is a sense of flow.
Billy Collins
#77. When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.
Billy Collins
#78. Now that I'm older, a real source of interest is the ages of the dead, the number; the day is off to an optimistic start when the departed are all older than I.
Billy Collins
#79. The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry ...
Billy Collins
#80. Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.
Billy Collins
#81. When i believe in everything, I could not see
the actors semicircled around a studio microphone
flipping the pages of scripts in unison.
I only heard the voices, resonant, electric, adult,
accusing each other of murder.
Billy Collins
#82. I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits.
Billy Collins
#83. The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.
Billy Collins
#84. I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum - the poem finds a reason for continuing.
Billy Collins
#85. I just reached the point where plot-driven novels don't hold my interest because I don't care about the fate of characters anymore - whether Emily marries Tom or not, that kind of thing.
Billy Collins
#86. My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.
Billy Collins
#87. I am a nonparticipant of social media. I'm not much attracted to anything that involves the willing forfeiture of privacy and the foregrounding of insignificance.
Billy Collins
#88. But earlier this week on a wooded path,
I thought the swans afloat on the reservoir
were the true geniuses,
the ones who had figured out how to fly,
how to be both beautiful and brutal,
and how to mate for life.
Billy Collins
#89. There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.
Billy Collins
#90. I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.
Billy Collins
#91. I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky ...
Billy Collins
#92. The girl who signed her papers in lipstick
leans against the drugstore, smoking,
brushing her hair like a machine
Billy Collins
#93. My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I'm initiating something, or I'm making a move.
Billy Collins
#94. Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.
Billy Collins
#96. Is there a better method of departure by night
than this quiet bon voyage with an open book,
the sole companion who has come to see you off,
to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?
Billy Collins
#97. A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.
Billy Collins
#98. I'm an only child, and I can take all the attention you manage to pile on me.
Billy Collins
#100. For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.
Billy Collins
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