Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always… — 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
I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches... — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile… — 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
