...the trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry... — 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
The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something… — 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
You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I can't picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I'm… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part… — 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
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
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
And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I'm speaking to someone I'm trying to get to fall in love with me. I'm trying to speak intimately to one person.… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once… — 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
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
I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when "Howl" and Rebel Without a… — 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 sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil. — 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 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
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
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
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
“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
