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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

Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.
BILLY COLLINS

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

Memories Perception Two
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.
BILLY COLLINS

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

Character Happy Kid Kids
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
BILLY COLLINS

Novelists Poet Typewriters
I’m a line-maker. I think that’s what makes poets different from prose-writers. That’s the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we’re doing these two things at the same time.
BILLY COLLINS

Different Thinking Two
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, ‘What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?’
BILLY COLLINS

Poem Real Thinking Writing
I don’t know if anyone’s reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established.
BILLY COLLINS

Anyone Country Established Going Lectern
…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
BILLY COLLINS

Lost Needs Wish
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Believe Poet Reading School Started
Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There’s always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I’d say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it’s too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.
BILLY COLLINS

Once Pleasurable Sitting Thinking Writing
Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.
BILLY COLLINS

Aspect Chaos Form
It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
BILLY COLLINS

Good Life Public Shelves Things
I was able to read poets that were – allowed me to be humorous without being silly.
BILLY COLLINS

Able Humorous Silly
I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels – children and poets both tend to feel.
BILLY COLLINS

Child Children Only Parent
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

Believe Cutting Yesterday

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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