Top 40 Billy Collins Quotes

I have a stack of those plastic card hotel room keys that I picked up on this latest book tour. It’s about a yard tall. Ah yes, a stack of lonely nights.

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

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 really have a distaste for poets who announce themselves at 50 yards; you know, here he comes, you know, with the beret and the cane and the cape and the whatever – whatever mishegas is part of the outfit there.

Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside.

I’m all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.

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.

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

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

I don’t want to sound like an aesthete, but one has to be true to the art. And that means being true to the tradition of the art but also being true to your own artistic vision.

When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things – it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.

I’m very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Cummings’ career as a writer – and a painter – was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten.

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.

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

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

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

Emily Dickinson never developed. She remained loyal to her persona and to that same little metrical song that stood her in such good stead. She is a striking example of complexity within a simple package. Her rhymes are like bows on the package.

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

Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results in all cases. And the poem, if it’s written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed.

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.

I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.

I just reached the point where plot-driven novels don’t hold my interest because I don’t care about the fate of characters anymore – whether Emily marries Tom or not, that kind of thing.

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

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.

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.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It’s 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.

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

I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.

One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people’s heads as they listen in the car. You don’t have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it’s just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.

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.

I’m a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I’d rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.

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.

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