Billy Collins Quotes

I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.

After counting all the sheep in the worldI enumerate the wildebeests, snails,camels, skylarks, etc.,then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,country by country.By early light I am asleepin a nightmare...

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

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 compartmentand toss it out the window i...

I feel like the secretary to the morning whose only/responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation/

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

The whole idea of it makes me feel Like I’m coming down with something, Something worse than any stomach acheOr the headaches I get from reading in bad light –A kind of measles of the spiritA mumps of...

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray Everything is fine— the first bits of sun are on the yellow flowers behind the low wall, people in cars are on their way to work, and I will never have to write again....

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

Building with Its Face Blown OffHow suddenly the privateis revealed in a bombed-out city,how the blue and white striped wallpaperof a second story bedroom is nowexposed to the lightly falling snowas i...

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

I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits.

A long time ago when cataclysms were commonas sneezes and land masses slidaround the globe looking for placesto settle down and become continents,someone introduced us at a party.

I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.

Though they know in their adult hearts,even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bedfor his appalling behavior,that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,their wives are Dopey Dopeheadsand that they thems...

I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.

…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

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 b...

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

First, her tippet made of tulle,easily lifted off her shoulders and laidon the back of a wooden chair.And her bonnet,the bow undone with a light forward pull.Then the long white dress, a morecomplicat...