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
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
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
I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil. — 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 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
I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so… — 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
![“I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there's always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.” quote by Billy Collins](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/02c/billy-collins-3004_attacking_i-felt-at-some-point-that-i-had-nothing_2144137.jpg)
