Billy Collins Quotes

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

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

Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it's too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty. ~ Billy Collins

... (my father) would say nothing,
And I could not find a silence
Among the one hundred Chinese silences
That would fit the one he created
Even though I was the one
Who had just made up the business
Of the one hundred Chinese silences-
The Silence of the Night Boat.
And the Silence of the Lotus,
Cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell
Only deeper and softer ... ~ Billy Collins

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

The Death of Allegory

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions
that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings
and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance
displaying their capital letters like license plates.


Truth cantering on a powerful horse,
Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.
Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,
Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,


Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,
Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.
They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.
Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.


Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.
Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,
and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,
hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles.


Even if you called them back, there are no places left
for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss.
The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums
and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.


Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies
and next to it black binoculars and a money clip,
exactly the kind of thing we now prefer,
objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case,


themselves and nothing ~ Billy Collins

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

I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets. ~ Billy Collins

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

Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards ... I don't know if anyone's reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established. ~ Billy Collins

I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits. ~ Billy Collins

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

We must always look at things
from the point of view of eternity,
the college theologians used to insist,
from which, I imagine, we would all
appear to have speed lines trailing behind us
as we rush along the road of the world,
as we rush down the long tunnel of time-
the biker, of course, drunk on the wind,
but also the man reading by a fire ... ~ Billy Collins

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

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

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

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. ~ Billy Collins

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

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. ~ Billy Collins

I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me. ~ Billy Collins

I am a nonparticipant of social media. I'm not much attracted to anything that involves the willing forfeiture of privacy and the foregrounding of insignificance. ~ Billy Collins

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

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

More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree - a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader. ~ Billy Collins

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

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

A long time ago when cataclysms were common
as sneezes and land masses slid
around the globe looking for places
to settle down and become continents,
someone introduced us at a party. ~ Billy Collins

These days every morning begins like a joke
you think you have heard before,
but there is no one telling it
whom you can stop.
One day it's about a cow who walks into a bar,
then about a man with a big nose on his honeymoon,
then about a kangaroo who walks into a bar.
Each one takes up an entire day.
The sun looks like a prank Nathanael West
is pulling on the world; on the drive to work
cars are swinging comically from lane to lane.
The houses and lawns belong in cartoons.
The hours collapse into one another's arms.
The stories arc over noon and descend
like slow ferris wheels into the haze of evening.
You wish you could stop listening and get serious.
Trouble is you cannot remember the punch line
which never arrives till very late at night,
just as you are reaching for the bedside lamp,
just before you begin laughing in the dark. ~ Billy Collins

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. ~ Billy Collins

Perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.
She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians. ~ Billy Collins

When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up. ~ Billy Collins

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

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

I can't picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I'm making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry. ~ Billy Collins

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

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

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

But earlier this week on a wooded path,
I thought the swans afloat on the reservoir
were the true geniuses,
the ones who had figured out how to fly,
how to be both beautiful and brutal,
and how to mate for life. ~ Billy Collins

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. ~ Billy Collins

Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading. ~ Billy Collins

When i believe in everything, I could not see
the actors semicircled around a studio microphone
flipping the pages of scripts in unison.
I only heard the voices, resonant, electric, adult,
accusing each other of murder. ~ Billy Collins

In a while, one of us will go up to bed
and the other one will follow.
Then we will slip below the surface of the night
into miles of water, drifting down and down
to the dark, soundless bottom
until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still,
below the shale and layered rock,
beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure,
into the broken bones of the earth itself,
into the marrow of the only place we know. ~ 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

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. ~ Billy Collins

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

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. ~ Billy Collins

For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore. ~ Billy Collins

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. ~ 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 get from reading in bad light –
A kind of measles of the spirit
A mumps of the psyche,
A disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
But that is because you have forgotten
The perfect simplicity of being one
And the beautiful complexity introduced by two
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit

At four I was an Arabian wizard
I could make myself invisible
By drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a solider, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
Watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
Against the side of my tree house,
And my bicycle never leaned against the garage
As it does today,
All the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
As I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imagry friends,
Time to turn the first big number. ~ Billy Collins

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

I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one's interested in the experiences of a stranger - let's put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry. ~ Billy Collins

A poem is an interruption of silence, whereas prose is a continuation of noise. ~ Billy Collins

You know the parlor trick.
wrap your arms around your own body
and from the back it looks like
someone is embracing you
her hands grasping your shirt
her fingernails teasing your neck
from the front it is another story
you never looked so alone
your crossed elbows and screwy grin
you could be waiting for a tailor
to fit you with a straight jacket
one that would hold you really tight. ~ Billy Collins

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. ~ Billy Collins

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. ~ Billy Collins

There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase.
You lift a gun from the glove compartment
and toss it out the window into the desert heat. ~ Billy Collins

Death is what makes life fun. ~ Billy Collins

The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.
[ ... ]
The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon. ~ Billy Collins

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

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

The whole world of publishing is moving to electronic, but when you put a poem on a screen and you increase the type size, the shape of a poem changes. ~ Billy Collins

The disappointing second novel is measured against the brilliant first novel - often no novel lives up to the first. Literary improvement seems like an unfair expectation. ~ Billy Collins

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

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. ~ Billy Collins

I think it's good not to make demands on the reader too early. But as the poem goes on, I want the journey of the poem to lead into some interesting places. ~ Billy Collins

Grave

What do you think of my new glasses
I asked as I stood under a shade tree
before the joined grave of my parents,

and what followed was a long silence
that descended on the rows of the dead
and on the fields and the woods beyond,

one of the one hundred kinds of silence
according to the Chinese belief,
each one distinct from the others,

but the differences being so faint
that only a few special monks
were able to tell them apart.

They make you look very scholarly,
I heard my mother say
once I lay down on the ground

and pressed an ear into the soft grass.
Then I rolled over and pressed
my other ear to the ground,

the ear my father likes to speak into,
but he would say nothing,
and I could not find a silence

among the 100 Chinese silences
that would fit the one that he created
even though I was the one

who had just made up the business
of the 100 Chinese silences -
the Silence of the Night Boat

and the Silence of the Lotus,
cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell
only deeper and softer, like petals, at its farthest edges. ~ Billy Collins

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. ~ Billy Collins

When I began to dare to be clear, because 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 are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand. ~ Billy Collins

We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry. ~ Billy Collins

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. ~ Billy Collins

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. ~ Billy Collins

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

People think of poetry as a school subject ... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover. ~ Billy Collins

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

I find it strange that - at least in my take on it - the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient. It's always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it's found its way back. And it's simply an ingredient. ~ Billy Collins

There are just long gaps where I can't find a point of insertion, I can't find a good opening line, I can't find a mood that I want to write into. But once I do, once a line falls out of the air, or I get a little inkling of a subject and I recognize that, it's like the sense that a game has started. ~ Billy Collins

It seems only yesterday that I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed. ~ Billy Collins

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

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

I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people. ~ Maya Angelou

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

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

O Canada I have not forgotten you,
as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision
of a bookcase.
You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.
You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on
the wall.
You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.
You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.
But not only that,
you are the two boys with pails walking along that road. ~ Billy Collins

The really authentic thing about humor is that anyone can pretend to be serious. Anyone who's ever had a job - in fact, we're pretending to be serious now, more or less. ~ Billy Collins

I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we're drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious. ~ Billy Collins

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

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. ~ 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 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

Poems are not easy to start, and they're not easy to finish. There's a great pleasure in - I wouldn't say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started. ~ Billy Collins

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore ...
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle
... too much to name, too much to think about. ~ Billy Collins

Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn't know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life. ~ Billy Collins

¨Yet the one I think of most often_¨ ~ Billy Collins

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. ~ Billy Collins

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

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

Emily Dickinson seems rather tame because she pretty much uses the same meter every time. It's called 'common meter.' It's a line of four beats that's followed by a line of three beats. ~ Billy Collins

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

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. ~ John Updike

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

There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice. ~ Billy Collins