Point of view 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

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

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