Billy Collins Quotes

I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly diffe...

perhaps the answer is simply one:one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,a small jazz co...

It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light.If you cut me I c...

When i believe in everything, I could not seethe actors semicircled around a studio microphoneflippi...

The fly lands on the swatter.The movie runs backwardsand catches fire in the projector.This species ...

These days every morning begins like a joke you think you have heard before, but there is no one tel...

though they know in their adult hearts,even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bedfor his appalling...

There are easier ways of making sense,the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.You hold a girl's ...

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along ...

all they want to dois tie the poem to a chair with ropeand torture a confession out of it.They begin...

I could feel the day offering itself to me,and I wanted nothing morethan to be in the moment-but whi...

But some nights, I must tell you,I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.I swim back and fo...

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more l...

The History TeacherTrying to protect his students' innocencehe told them the Ice Age was really just...

Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sol...

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

This is what I think aboutwhen I shovel compostinto a wheelbarrow,and when I fill the long flower bo...

It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it t...

The LanyardThe other day I was ricocheting slowlyoff the blue walls of this room,moving as if underw...

I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main th...

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry...

Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a dive...

There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I...

The whole idea of it makes me feellike I'm coming down with something,something worse than any stoma...

You know the parlor trick.wrap your arms around your own bodyand from the back it looks likesomeone ...

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that le...

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the me...

It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light.If you cut me I c...

A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper....

Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the v...

Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the ra...

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

The life of Edward Estlin Cummings began with a childhood in Cambridge, Mass., that he described as ...

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

I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have...

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

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they do...

I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cockta...

Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a differe...

We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that w...

For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, conte...

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poe...

I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because th...

When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, bu...

If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in th...

There's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be ser...

I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and fre...

If an artist is driven primarily by social responsibility, I think the art probably suffers because,...

I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warn...

One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally ...

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

In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poet...

Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to ...

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to ...

I think it’s vital. It’s odd to me because many people say we live in these awful times and we need ...

I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be o...

No one here likes a wet dog.

a long time ago when cataclysms were commonas sneezes and land masses slidaround the globe looking f...