Billy Collins Quotes

58 quotes in 868 categories

• Death is what makes life fun.
• I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.
• It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.
• A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.
• When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector…
• It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
• I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the…
• One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored…
• Poetry is my cheap means of transportation, by the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started.…
• Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can…
• I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.
• I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.
• Bugs Bunny is my muse.
• Write the poem only you can write.
• So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
• In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
• But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.
• Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.
• I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times -…
• 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 few drafts, I…

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