I was able to read poets that were - allowed me to be humorous without being silly. — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“...The dog (the poet) is on top of a locomotive,”… “He’s got a box full of track, and he’s frenetically laying down… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane. — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
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… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Another trouble with poetry - and I'm gonna stop the list at two - is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that,… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
A trouble with poetry is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov,… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“The whole idea of it makes me feel Like I’m coming down with something, Something worse than any stomach ache Or the headaches I… — Billy Collins Copy Share
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… — Billy Collins Copy Share
...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word… Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's so — Billy Collins Copy Share
I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky... — Billy Collins Copy Share
A trouble with poetry is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted… — Billy Collins Copy Share
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… — Billy Collins Copy Share
But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow. — Billy Collins Copy Share
I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano… — Billy Collins Copy Share
Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can't go home again; but that doesn't mean… — Billy Collins Copy Share
Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things… — Billy Collins Copy Share
You know how sometimes you just have a memory of looking up and seeing a face looking over your crib and then remember nothing… — Billy Collins Copy Share
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… — Billy Collins Copy Share
I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when "Howl" and Rebel Without a Cause and… — Billy Collins Copy Share
Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult… — Billy Collins Copy Share
