Billy Collins famous quotes

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 by everybody else.
-- Billy Collins

#Ridiculous #Ignored #Poet

But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.
-- Billy Collins

#Light #Offering #Bird

The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
-- Billy Collins

#Mind #Paper

Write the poem only you can write.
-- Billy Collins

#Writing

A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
-- Billy Collins

#Wind #Arms #Faces

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

#Land #Insanity #Boundaries

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
-- Billy Collins

#Mean #Ties #Rope

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

#Firsts #Succeed #Motto

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

#Contentment #Tonight #Lions

In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
-- Billy Collins

#Voice #Process #Oneself

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

#Wine #Knives #Bread

And strangely enoughthe only emotion I ever feel, is what the beaver must feel, as he bears each stick to his hidden construction, which creates the tranquil pond and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle, and the pair of swans a place to conceal their young
-- Billy Collins

#Swans #Giving #Ponds

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 you're not free to try. A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole's charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs.
-- Billy Collins

#Mean #Home #Trying

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

#Chaos #Form #Aspect

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.
-- Billy Collins

#Book #Son #Night

…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
-- Billy Collins

#Wish #Needs #Lost

High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
-- Billy Collins

#School #High School

And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.
-- Billy Collins

#Eye #Writing #Together

I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum - the poem finds a reason for continuing.
-- Billy Collins

#Thinking #Doe #Momentum

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

#Eye #Everyday #Natural

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

#Heart #Arrows #Fields

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 little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.
-- Billy Collins

#Writing #Journey #Imagination

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 type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.
-- Billy Collins

#Notebook #Writing #Doors

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
-- Billy Collins

#Moving #Wish #Needs

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

#Typewriters #Novelists #Poet

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

#Fall #Light #Window

...the trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry...
-- Billy Collins

#Writing #Trouble #Poetry Is

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

#Two #Forever #Together

Vade Mecum I want the scissors to be sharp and the table perfectly level when you cut me out of my life and paste me in that book you always carry.
-- Billy Collins

#Book #Cutting #Levels

It's time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkable men and women anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabitized things a million forgotten hours.
-- Billy Collins

#Book #Night #Men

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

#Believe #Cutting #Yesterday

No one here likes a wet dog.
-- Billy Collins

#Dog #Wet Dogs #Likes

Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
-- Billy Collins

#Wall #Mean #Light

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

#Pleasure #Source

life is a loaded gun that looks right at you with a yellow eye.
-- Billy Collins

#Eye #Gun #Yellow

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

#Book #These Days

I could feel the day offering itself to me, and I wanted nothing more than to be in the moment-but which moment? Not that one, or that one, or that one,
-- Billy Collins

#Offering #Moments #Feels

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
-- Billy Collins

#Memories #Fishing #Names

This is not what it is like to be you, I realized as a few of your magnificent clouds flew over the rooftop. It is just me thinking about being you. And before I headed back down the hill, I walked in a circle around your house, making an invisible line which you would have to cross before dark.
-- Billy Collins

#Dark #Thinking #Clouds

But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.
-- Billy Collins

#Song #Rain #Home

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 write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
-- Billy Collins

#Writing #Voice #Style

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

#Stars #Moon #Sky

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow...
-- Billy Collins

#Reading #Light #Circles

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

#Kind #Rudeness #Obscure

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

#Voice #Perfect #Radio

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 has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.
-- Billy Collins

#Keys #Dna #Signatures

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, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.
-- Billy Collins

#Writing #Discovery #Agendas

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

#Wall #Heart #Names

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

#Writing #Dark #Flames

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

#Memories #Southern #Brain

Death is what makes life fun.
-- Billy Collins

#Fun #Fun Life

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 take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
-- Billy Collins

#Mean #Funny Things #Departure

Bugs Bunny is my muse.
-- Billy Collins

#Creativity #Bunnies #Bugs

I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.
-- Billy Collins

#Brother #Creativity #Thinking

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 shields that were installed in high school.
-- Billy Collins

#School #High School #Shields

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

#Good Things #Shelves

There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.
-- Billy Collins

#Mean #Interesting #Want

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
-- Billy Collins

#Real #Writing #Thinking

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.
-- Billy Collins

#Thinking #Underrated

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. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.
-- Billy Collins

#Mean #Night #Different

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 this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.
-- Billy Collins

#People #Pleasure #Offers

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 deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.
-- Billy Collins

#School #Listening #Radio

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 day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can't afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.
-- Billy Collins

#Thinking #Path #Distraction