Billy Collins 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.

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

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

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.

The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.

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

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.

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.

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

Write the poem only you can write.

I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I'm speaking to someone I'm trying to get to fall in love with me. I'm trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I'm not speaking to an audience. I'm not writing for the podium. I'm just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I'm trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.

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.