You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried. — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but… — 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
“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 Image
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 Image
...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's so — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow. — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
