All Billy Collins Quotes
- Death is what makes life fun. Death
- I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil. Appear
- It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain. Brain
- A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried. Adopted
- 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… Anti
- It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life. Get Poetry
- 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… Afford
- 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… Aspect
- 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.… Cheap
- 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… Departure
- I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible. Accessible
- I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons. Brother
- Bugs Bunny is my muse. Bugs
- Write the poem only you can write. Funny
- So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart. Barely
- In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice. Called
- But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow. Arrow
- Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction. 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 -… Continue
- 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… Ball
- I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a… Beginning
- Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to… Ambushed
- Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of… Confronted
- The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it… Bases
- The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda,… Agenda