Top 80 Billy Collins Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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

— Billy Collins

3. “So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.”

— Billy Collins

4. “All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.”

— Billy Collins

5. “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

6. “I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky...”

— Billy Collins

7. “In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.”

— Billy Collins

8. “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...”

— Billy Collins

Featured in: Reading Quotes

9. “Death is what makes life fun.”

— Billy Collins

Featured in: Fun Quotes

10. “A motto I’ve adopted is, if at first you don’t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.”

— Billy Collins

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

— Billy Collins

12. “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

13. “Often people, when they’re confronted with a poem, it’s like someone who keep saying ‘what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?’ And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.”

— Billy Collins

14. “High School is the place where poetry goes to die.”

— Billy Collins

15. “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

16. “I’m trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I’m trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it’s usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.”

— Billy Collins

17. “Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.”

— Billy Collins

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

— Billy Collins

19. “Until recently, I thought ‘occasional poetry’ meant that you wrote only occasionally.”

— Billy Collins

20. “The really authentic thing about humor is that anyone can pretend to be serious. Anyone who’s ever had a job – in fact, we’re pretending to be serious now, more or less.”

— Billy Collins

21. “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.”

— Billy Collins

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

— Billy Collins

23. “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.”

— Billy Collins

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

— Billy Collins

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

— Billy Collins

26. “You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and – somehow – the wine.”

— Billy Collins

27. “No one here likes a wet dog.”

— Billy Collins

28. “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.”

— Billy Collins

29. “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

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

— Billy Collins

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

— Billy Collins

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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.”

— Billy Collins

35. “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.”

— Billy Collins

36. “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

37. “You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.”

— Billy Collins

38. “Write the poem only you can write.”

— Billy Collins

39. “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

40. “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.”

— Billy Collins

41. “I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.”

— Billy Collins

42. “I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one’s interested in the experiences of a stranger – let’s put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.”

— Billy Collins

43. “This is not what it is like to be you, I realized as a few of your magnificent clouds flew over the rooftop. It is just me thinking about being you. And before I headed back down the hill, I walked in a circle around your house, making an invisible line which you would have to cross before dark.”

— Billy Collins

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

— Billy Collins

45. “The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.”

— Billy Collins

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

— Billy Collins

47. “Bugs Bunny is my muse.”

— Billy Collins

48. “I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.”

— Billy Collins

49. “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.”

— Billy Collins

50. “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.”

— Billy Collins