Billy Collins Quotes

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.

A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.

Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.

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.

In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

Write the poem only you can write.

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

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

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

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

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.

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

There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.

No one here likes a wet dog.

Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.

And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches.

You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.

I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky.

Death is what makes life fun.

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

The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.

Bugs Bunny is my muse.

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

…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its 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.

High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

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

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.

I was able to read poets that were - allowed me to be humorous without being silly.

I could feel the day offering itself to me, and I wanted nothing more than to be in the moment-but which moment? Not that one, or that one, or that one.

Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.

I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

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

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

This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow.

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

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.