Billy Collins Quotes

I'm easily frightened, and I've also come to realize that old Catholic guilt or remorse is easily stimulated.

I think 'accessible' just means that the reader can walk into the poem without difficulty. The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry.

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

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

And I should mention the light
which falls through the big windows this time of day
italicizing everything it touches ...

Very few people have actually read Freud, but everyone seems prepared to talk about him in that Woody Allen way. To read Freud is not as much fun.

Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.

The dog (the poet) is on top of a locomotive," ... "He's got a box full of track, and he's frenetically laying down track in front of the train.

One burst after another as my wife turned in her sleep. I was a single monkey trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet,

I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.

Bugs Bunny is my muse.

High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

When you put a book together and arrange it, there's a lot of anxiety and turmoil about what order the poems should be in.

... balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

I'm going through life's cycles at an alarmingly fast pace, but my persona has a Peter Pan quality: he doesn't age.

Death is what makes life fun.

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

I was able to read poets that were - allowed me to be humorous without being silly.

The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.

It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.

I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together

Write the poem only you can write.

So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.

A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.

The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.

I'm an only child, and I can take all the attention you manage to pile on me.

After all, is a gentleman's library of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves anything more than a vanity?

It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

This love for everyday things,
part natural from the wide eye of Infancy,
part a literary calculation

I'm not a claustrophobe, but you don't need to be to feel claustrophobic inside an MRI. It's like being buried alive.

All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.

The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry ...

Life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

There's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can't pretend to be funny.

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

There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.

One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you.

I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.

I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.

I'll listen to anything authentic whether it's bluegrass or gospel or blues.

No one here likes a wet dog.

You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and - somehow - the wine.

I learned snails don't have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence.

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.

The girl who signed her papers in lipstick
leans against the drugstore, smoking,
brushing her hair like a machine

You trip over a word while carrying
a tray of vocabulary out to the pool
only to discover that broken glass
is a good topic.

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.'

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.

I'm a nearly uncontrollable Geoff Dyer fan, who I think is one of the most comically brilliant writers today.

But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.

I don't write for an auditorium full of people. I don't write for the microphone; I write for the page.

And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air

Just pour the tea, just look into the eye of the flower, just sing the song - one thing at a time and

Besides the aesthetics, besides teaching an appreciation of T.S. Eliot, a basic need is fulfilled when you teach English at CUNY.

I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.

When I write, I'm not trying to be funny. It's the way I look at the world.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.

Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.

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

Poems are perfect for something to listen to while you're walking around because they don't take very long.

It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

Would pass in the street, mostly people whose existence I did not believe in,

I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.

Discovering Samuel Beckett in college was a big deal for me. I realized you could be very funny and very dark at the same time.