Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I find it strange that - at least in my take on it - the people who are the most alarmed about… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane… — 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
Poems are not easy to start, and they're not easy to finish. There's a great pleasure in - I wouldn't say ease,… — 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
I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there's… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
By clarity I don't mean that we're always in kind of a simple area where everything is clear and comforting and understood.… — 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
