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
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
Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally. — 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 just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Poems are not easy to start, and they're not easy to finish. There's a great pleasure in - I wouldn't say ease,… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“O Canada I have not forgotten you, as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision of a bookcase. You are 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
One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally… — 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
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
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
“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
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
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
...the trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry... — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
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
Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that,… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Poetry is my cheap means of transportation, by the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from… — 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
I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“...The dog (the poet) is on top of a locomotive,”.... “He’s got a box full of track, and he’s frenetically laying down… — 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
