263 Quotes by Billy Collins

One of these days I’m-a make me a book out of you.

Just pour the tea, just look into the eye of the flower, just sing the song – one thing at a time and.

You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and – somehow – the wine.

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.

In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents are buried side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite. Then, all day, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

I thanked everyone whose job it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers, and I gave general thanks that I was lying facedown in a warm puddle of soap and not a warm puddle of blood in some corner of this incomprehensible city.

Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there’s no visual distraction.

I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together.

There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.