Billy Collins Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Self, Differences, Poetry

  72 Copy quote

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

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Dark, Flames

  4 Copy quote

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

  Billy Collins

  Green, Peas, Wanted

  Billy Collins (2012). “The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems”, p.20, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Billy Collins (2012). “Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes”, p.70, Pan Macmillan

  57 Copy quote

• The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.

  Billy Collins

  Mind, Paper

  35 Copy quote

• 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

  44 Copy quote

• 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

  Moon, Night, Lakes

  32 Copy quote

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

  Billy Collins

  Voice, Process, Oneself

  30 Copy quote

• Write the poem only you can write.

  Billy Collins

  Writing

  29 Copy quote

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Thinking, Should Have, Perfect

  9 Copy quote

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

  Billy Collins

  Typewriters, Novelists, Poet

  FaceBook post by Billy Collins from May 31, 2013

  25 Copy quote

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

  Billy Collins

  Land, Insanity, Boundaries

  33 Copy quote

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

  Billy Collins

  Kind, Rudeness, Obscure

  7 Copy quote

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

  Billy Collins

  Wall, Heart, Names

  Billy Collins (2013). “Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems”, p.209, Random House

  23 Copy quote

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

  Billy Collins

  Contentment, Tonight, Lions

  Billy Collins (2011). “Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems”, p.49, Random House

  26 Copy quote

• 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, Names

  Billy Collins (2014). “The Apple That Astonished Paris: Poems”, p.58, University of Arkansas Press

  29 Copy quote

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

  Billy Collins

  Chaos, Form, Aspect

  4 Copy quote

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

  Billy Collins

  Wish, Needs, Lost

  Billy Collins (1992). “Questions About Angels”, p.80, University of Pittsburgh Press

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  21 Copy quote

• 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, Midnight, Tails

  Billy Collins (2011). “Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems”, p.9, Random House

  23 Copy quote

• As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing - and I think that this is important for all writers - I'm trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I'll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Thinking, Two

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Billy Collins

  Heart, Arrows, Fields

  Billy Collins (2012). “Nine Horses”, p.18, Pan Macmillan

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• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Trying

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

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