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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

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

Billy Collins

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More Billy Collins Quotes

• 

  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.

  BILLY COLLINS
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• 

  I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn’t know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.

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• 

  Bugs Bunny is my muse.

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• 

  Another trouble with poetry – and I’m gonna stop the list at two – is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry.

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• 

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

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• 

  I have one of these early memories where I’m in the back of my parents’ car, a place I loved to spend a lot of time as an only child, not having to fight with venomous siblings over the only toy.

  BILLY COLLINS
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• 

  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.

  BILLY COLLINS
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• 

  It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.

  BILLY COLLINS
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• 

  Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.

  BILLY COLLINS
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• 

  It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.

  BILLY COLLINS
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• 

  Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

  BILLY COLLINS
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• 

  I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.

  BILLY COLLINS
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• 

  When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.

  BILLY COLLINS
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• 

  Listeners are kind of ambushed… if a poem just happens to be said when they’re listening to the radio. The listener doesn’t have time to deploy what I call their ‘poetry deflector shields’ that were installed in high school – there’s little time to resist the poem.

  BILLY COLLINS
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• 

  I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.

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• 

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

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