Quotes by Billy Collins

It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.

The whole world of publishing is moving to electronic, but when you put a poem on a screen and you increase the type size, the shape of a poem changes.

But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.

For I, too, am a serious student of cartoons.

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

In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.

A poem is an interruption of silence, whereas prose is a continuation of noise.

Vade Mecum I want the scissors to be sharp and the table perfectly level when you cut me out of my life and paste me in that book you always carry.

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

Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it's too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.

More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree -- a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.

I can see one of them clearly now, walking
along with a newspaper tucked under his arm.
he has cut himself shaving and a bit of tissue
with a circle of blood is stuck to his cheek,.

There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase.
You lift a gun from the glove compartment
and toss it out the window into the desert heat.

There's something about death going on here.

There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.

On the dance floor, we were all doing the struggle.

I was able to read poets that were -- allowed me to be humorous without being silly.

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.

The life of Edward Estlin Cummings began with a childhood in Cambridge, Mass., that he described as happy, but he struggled in both his artistic and romantic exploits against the piousness of his father, an esteemed Harvard professor.

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.

I'm very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of the poem. And that the ending of the line is a way of turning the reader's attention back into the interior of the poem.

Bugs Bunny is my muse.

When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.

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.

Death is what makes life fun.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow.

A long time ago when cataclysms were common
as sneezes and land masses slid
around the globe looking for places
to settle down and become continents,
someone introduced us at a party.

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.

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

It's time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkable men and women anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabitized things a million forgotten hours.

I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand.

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

You'll find i-poetry, you'll find that you can download poetry, that you can stuff your i-pod with recorded poetry. So just to answer the question that way, I think that poetry is gonna catch up with that technology quite soon.

When I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand.

After counting all the sheep in the world
I enumerate the wildebeests, snails,
camels, skylarks, etc.,

then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,
country by country.

By early light I am asleep
in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood,.

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.

I can't picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I'm making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.

I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together.

And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches.

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

No one here likes a wet dog.

This love for everyday things,

part natural from the wide eye of Infancy,

part a literary calculation.

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

You trip over a word while carrying
a tray of vocabulary out to the pool
only to discover that broken glass
is a good topic.

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.

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

I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels -- children and poets both tend to feel.

The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else.

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.

Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness.

It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.

And strangely enoughthe only emotion I ever feel, is what the beaver must feel, as he bears each stick to his hidden construction, which creates the tranquil pond and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle, and the pair of swans a place to conceal their young.

I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we're drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.

Life is a loaded gun that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

When i believe in everything, I could not see
the actors semicircled around a studio microphone
flipping the pages of scripts in unison.
I only heard the voices, resonant, electric, adult,
accusing each other of murder.

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore...
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle--
...too much to name, too much to think about.

Besides the aesthetics, besides teaching an appreciation of T.S. Eliot, a basic need is fulfilled when you teach English at CUNY.

I'm going through life's cycles at an alarmingly fast pace, but my persona has a Peter Pan quality: he doesn't age.

You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

Though they know in their adult hearts,
even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed
for his appalling behavior,
that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,
their wives are Dopey Dopeheads
and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.

The girl who signed her papers in lipstick
leans against the drugstore, smoking,
brushing her hair like a machine.

It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.

I did try to write stories in college because I was interested in writing, and I was interested in the sound of language, but I was just no good at narrative and at fiction.

I'm easily frightened, and I've also come to realize that old Catholic guilt or remorse is easily stimulated.

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

I learned snails don't have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence.

Poems are perfect for something to listen to while you're walking around because they don't take very long.

I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.

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.

When you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet's decision, it becomes the device's decision.

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

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.

I'm an only child, and I can take all the attention you manage to pile on me.

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

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.

Discovering Samuel Beckett in college was a big deal for me. I realized you could be very funny and very dark at the same time.