263 Quotes by Billy Collins

Often people, when they’re confronted with a poem, it’s like someone who keep saying ‘what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?’ And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

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.

I’m trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I’m trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it’s usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.

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

The really authentic thing about humor is that anyone can pretend to be serious. Anyone who’s ever had a job – in fact, we’re pretending to be serious now, more or less.

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.

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.

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.

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.