...the trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry... — 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
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
I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
You'll find i-poetry, you'll find that you can download poetry, that you can stuff your i-pod with recorded poetry. So just to… — 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
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
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
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
“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
