Billy Collins Quotes About School

Quotes about: School

• High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

  Billy Collins

  School, High School, Dies

• 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

  School, Miserable, Poet

  "Poet Billy Collins discusses humor, authenticity and ‘Aimless Love’". Interview with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. October 29, 2013.

• Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that, poets didn't give public readings very often, certainly not - there was no circuit of schools.

  Billy Collins

  Believe, Reading, School

  "Poet Billy Collins discusses humor, authenticity and ‘Aimless Love’". "PBS NewsHour" with Judy Woodruff, www.pbs.org. October 29, 2013.

• I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when "Howl" and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot of other new things were popping up. (Again I'm trying to give you a finite version of this career.) And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens when I was in college and graduate school, and basically set as a life goal the ambition of writing third-rate Wallace Stevens. I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Ambition, School

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

• 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

  Motivation, Inspiration, School

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  School, Listening, Radio

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