I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read. — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane. — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally. — 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
I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos. — 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 thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
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
When I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed.… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how… — 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
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
Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them.… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov,… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I always think W.S. Merwin's poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational… — 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
I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,… — 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
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
“ 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
“ 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
“ Japan Today I pass the time reading a favorite haiku, saying the few words over and over. It feels like eating… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes" First, her tippet made of tulle, easily lifted off her shoulders and laid on the back of… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which… — 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
“The History Teacher Trying to protect his students' innocence he told them the Ice Age was really just the Chilly Age, a… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
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
I was able to read poets that were - allowed me to be humorous without being silly. — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
...the trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry... — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem. — 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
