Billy Collins Quotes
Collection of top 73 famous quotes about Billy Collins
Billy Collins Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Billy Collins quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
I'm easily frightened, and I've also come to realize that old Catholic guilt or remorse is easily stimulated.
— Billy Collins
But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.
— 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
And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day
italicizing everything it touches ... — Billy Collins
Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.
— Billy Collins
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
— Billy Collins
It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine. — Billy Collins
The dog (the poet) is on top of a locomotive," ... "He's got a box full of track, and he's frenetically laying down track in front of the train.
— Billy Collins
One burst after another as my wife turned in her sleep. I was a single monkey trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet,
— Billy Collins
I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.
— Billy Collins
Bugs Bunny is my muse.
— Billy Collins
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
— 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
... balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
— 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
Death is what makes life fun.
— Billy Collins
I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.
— Billy Collins
The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
— Billy Collins
It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.
— Billy Collins
I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
— Billy Collins
Write the poem only you can write.
— 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
Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.
— Billy Collins
A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.
— Billy Collins
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
— Billy Collins
After all, is a gentleman's library of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves anything more than a vanity?
— Billy Collins
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
— Billy Collins
This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy,
part a literary calculation — Billy Collins
Life is a loaded gunthat looks right at you with a yellow eye. — Billy Collins
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.
— 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
There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
— Billy Collins
One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you.
— 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
I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.
— 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
No one here likes a wet dog.
— Billy Collins
You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and - somehow - the wine.
— Billy Collins
I learned snails don't have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence.
— Billy Collins
When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.
— Billy Collins
I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.
— Billy Collins
The girl who signed her papers in lipstickleans against the drugstore, smoking,
brushing her hair like a machine — Billy Collins
You trip over a word while carryinga tray of vocabulary out to the pool
only to discover that broken glass
is a good topic. — 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
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 a nearly uncontrollable Geoff Dyer fan, who I think is one of the most comically brilliant writers today.
— Billy Collins
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air — 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
Besides the aesthetics, besides teaching an appreciation of T.S. Eliot, a basic need is fulfilled when you teach English at CUNY.
— 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
It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.
— 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
Pleasure, of course, is a slippery word ... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source.
— Billy Collins
Poems are perfect for something to listen to while you're walking around because they don't take very long.
— Billy Collins
