Books Quote by Billy Collins

“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

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

...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word… Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's so

— Billy Collins

I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky...

— Billy Collins

Death is what makes life fun.

— Billy Collins

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

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

But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

— Billy Collins

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

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

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

Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not…

— Billy Collins