Quotes by Billy Collins

Billy Collins

American poet

Lived from: 1941 -

Category: Poets (Contemporary)

Born: 22 march 1941

Quotes 21 till 40 of 43.

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  • Poems are perfect for something to listen to while you're walking around because they don't take very long.
    ― Billy Collins
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  • 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
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  • Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.
    ― Billy Collins
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.
    ― Billy Collins
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  • The obituaries shot up to the top of my list when I discovered Robert McG. Thomas, the 'Times' obit writer who redesigned its traditional form and added a measure of stylistic elegance.
    ― Billy Collins
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  • 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
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  • The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
    ― Billy Collins
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  • 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
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  • The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.
    ― Billy Collins
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • To a poet, it's quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I'm not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets.
    ― Billy Collins
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  • 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
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  • Wars begin through greed and vanity and are continued through the insanity of nationalism in which the boundaries of a land replace God.
    Interview with Kritya: In the Name of Poetry
    ― Billy Collins
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  • 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
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  • When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, 'Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.'
    ― Billy Collins
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  • When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
    ― Billy Collins
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