263 Quotes by Billy Collins

Emily Dickinson seems rather tame because she pretty much uses the same meter every time. It's called 'common meter.' It's a line of four beats that's followed by a line of three beats.

There are just long gaps where I can't find a point of insertion, I can't find a good opening line, I can't find a mood that I want to write into. But once I do, once a line falls out of the air, or I get a little inkling of a subject and I recognize that, it's like the sense that a game has started.

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.

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 am a nonparticipant of social media. I'm not much attracted to anything that involves the willing forfeiture of privacy and the foregrounding of insignificance.

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

I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.

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

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.