There are just long gaps where I can't find a point of insertion, I can't find a good opening line, I can't… — 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
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
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
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
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
This is not what it is like to be you, I realized as a few of your magnificent clouds flew over the… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I'm very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a… — 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
