“would pass in the street, mostly people whose existence I did not believe in,” — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life. — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Vade Mecum I want the scissors to be sharp and the table perfectly level when you cut me out of my life… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“But earlier this week on a wooded path, I thought the swans afloat on the reservoir were the true geniuses, the ones… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“This is the middle. Things have had time to get complicated, messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore... This is the thick of… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“It seems only yesterday that I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I… — 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
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
It's time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to… — 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
“ Picnic, Lightning It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“ Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script.… — 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
