263 Quotes by Billy Collins

I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets.

I'm not a claustrophobe, but you don't need to be to feel claustrophobic inside an MRI. It's like being buried alive.

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

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

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.

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

Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards...I don't know if anyone's reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established.

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

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.