Quotes About Billy Collins

#1. Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.

John Updike

#2. I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.

Sherman Alexie

#3. BEFORE THERE WAS BILLY COLLINS & TED KOOSER, THERE WAS EDGAR GUEST

Ron Silliman

#4. The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

Gene Weingarten

#5. 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.

Maya Angelou

#6. It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.

Billy Collins

#7. I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

Billy Collins

#8. The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.

Billy Collins

#9. But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

Billy Collins

#10. 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

#11. I'm a nearly uncontrollable Geoff Dyer fan, who I think is one of the most comically brilliant writers today.

Billy Collins

#12. All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.

Billy Collins

#13. I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.

Billy Collins

#14. So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

Billy Collins

#15. 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

#16. I learned snails don't have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence.

Billy Collins

#17. 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

#18. It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

Billy Collins

#19. Pleasure, of course, is a slippery word ... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source.

Billy Collins

#20. After all, is a gentleman's library of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves anything more than a vanity?

Billy Collins

#21. It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.

Billy Collins

#22. I have a stack of those plastic card hotel room keys that I picked up on this latest book tour. It's about a yard tall. Ah yes, a stack of lonely nights.

Billy Collins

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. When you put a book together and arrange it, there's a lot of anxiety and turmoil about what order the poems should be in.

Billy Collins

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

Billy Collins

#30. I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.

Billy Collins

#31. You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite - embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

Billy Collins

#32. I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

Billy Collins

#33. 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

#34. I'm easily frightened, and I've also come to realize that old Catholic guilt or remorse is easily stimulated.

Billy Collins

#35. I don't write for an auditorium full of people. I don't write for the microphone; I write for the page.

Billy Collins

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. The whole world of publishing is moving to electronic, but when you put a poem on a screen and you increase the type size, the shape of a poem changes.

Billy Collins

#39. But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.

Billy Collins

#40. I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together

Billy Collins

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there's always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.

Billy Collins

#44. Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.

Billy Collins

#45. Poems are perfect for something to listen to while you're walking around because they don't take very long.

Billy Collins

#46. 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

#47. Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside.

Billy Collins

#48. 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

#49. It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

Billy Collins

#50. 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

#51. I can't picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I'm making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.

Billy Collins

#52. It is time to float on the waters of the night.
Time to wrap my arms around this book
and press it to my chest, life preserver
in a sea of unremarkable men and women,
anonymous faces on the street,
a hundred thousand unalphabetized things,
a million forgotten hours.

Billy Collins

#53. 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

#54. ... balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

Billy Collins

#55. When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.

Billy Collins

#56. We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry.

Billy Collins

#57. Billy Jean King could not get credit when her husband was in law school and she was winning the Wimbledon, because he had to sign the cards. You know, you had these cases in the '70s of women who were mayors who couldn't get credit unless their husbands signed for them.

Gail Collins

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it's too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.

Billy Collins

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that, poets didn't give public readings very often, certainly not - there was no circuit of schools.

Billy Collins

#69. High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

Billy Collins

#70. To a poet, it's quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I'm not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets.

Billy Collins

#71. 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

#72. While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

Billy Collins

#73. I'll listen to anything authentic whether it's bluegrass or gospel or blues.

Billy Collins

#74. 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

#75. Discovering Samuel Beckett in college was a big deal for me. I realized you could be very funny and very dark at the same time.

Billy Collins

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.

Billy Collins

#80. Poems are not easy to start, and they're not easy to finish. There's a great pleasure in - I wouldn't say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.

Billy Collins

#81. Suzanne [Collins] was very involved in the development of the script. She wrote the first draft. She was very involved with Billy Ray, when he wrote his draft.

Nina Jacobson

#82. 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

#83. There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase.
You lift a gun from the glove compartment
and toss it out the window into the desert heat.

Billy Collins

#84. I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.

Billy Collins

#85. 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

#86. The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.

Billy Collins

#87. 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

#88. And when my heart is beating
too rapidly in the dark,
I will go downstairs in a robe,
open it up to a blank page,
and try to settle on the blue lines
whatever it is that seems to be the matter.

Billy Collins

#89. Though they know in their adult hearts,
even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed
for his appalling behavior,
that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,
their wives are Dopey Dopeheads
and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.

Billy Collins

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.

Billy Collins

#94. One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you.

Billy Collins

#95. When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, 'Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.'

Billy Collins

#96. When I write, I'm not trying to be funny. It's the way I look at the world.

Billy Collins

#97. I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.'

Billy Collins

#98. I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.

Billy Collins

#99. When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.

Billy Collins

#100. 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