263 Quotes by Billy Collins

I was able to read poets that were - allowed me to be humorous without being silly.

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

I can't picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I'm making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.

...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source.

This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation

Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.

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

Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can't go home again; but that doesn't mean you're not free to try. A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole's charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs.