Top 80 Billy Collins Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Billy Collins

52. “Just pour the tea, just look into the eye of the flower, just sing the song – one thing at a time and.”

— Billy Collins

53. “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.”

— Billy Collins

54. “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.”

— Billy Collins

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

— Billy Collins

56. “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.”

— Billy Collins

57. “Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is that it’s always your turn – I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it’s under way, there is a sense of flow.”

— Billy Collins

58. “I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can’t quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.”

— Billy Collins

59. “After all, is a gentleman’s library of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves anything more than a vanity?”

— Billy Collins

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

— Billy Collins

61. “Poems are not easy to start, and they’re not easy to finish. There’s a great pleasure in – I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.”

— Billy Collins

62. “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

63. “It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.”

— Billy Collins

64. “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.”

— Billy Collins

65. “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.”

— Billy Collins

66. “I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.”

— Billy Collins

67. “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.”

— Billy Collins

68. “In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents are buried side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite. Then, all day, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.”

— Billy Collins

69. “I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.”

— Billy Collins

70. “I thanked everyone whose job it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers, and I gave general thanks that I was lying facedown in a warm puddle of soap and not a warm puddle of blood in some corner of this incomprehensible city.”

— Billy Collins

71. “One of these days I’m-a make me a book out of you.”

— Billy Collins

72. “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

73. “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.”

— Billy Collins

74. “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.”

— Billy Collins

75. “Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.”

— Billy Collins

76. “I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times – and this, I think, is a sense you develop – I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum – the poem finds a reason for continuing.”

— Billy Collins

77. “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

78. “Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.”

— Billy Collins

79. “It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.”

— Billy Collins

80. “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

81. “I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.”

— Billy Collins

82. “There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.”

— Billy Collins

83. “I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.”

— Billy Collins

84. “This is the beginning. Almost anything can happen. This is your first night with her, your first night without her. This is the middle. Things have had time to get more complicated, messy really. Nothing is simple anymore. And this is the end. It is me hitting the period and you closing the book.”

— Billy Collins

85. “I was able to read poets that were – allowed me to be humorous without being silly.”

— Billy Collins

86. “Is not poetry a megaphone held up to the whispering lips of death?”

— Billy Collins

87. “If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you’re still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.”

— Billy Collins