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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.

Billy Collins

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

Novelists Poet Typewriters
The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.
BILLY COLLINS

Agendas Discovery Writing
Bugs Bunny is my muse.
BILLY COLLINS

Bugs Bunnies Creativity
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
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
The entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
BILLY COLLINS

Decided Heard Hemisphere Memories Southern Suddenly
When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don’t have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.
BILLY COLLINS

Inspiration Motivation School
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Degrees Experimental Insane Kind More Often
I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.
BILLY COLLINS

Alphabetical Book Country Night People Shelves Son
Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.
BILLY COLLINS

Aspect Chaos Form
I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
BILLY COLLINS

Miserable Poet Seemed
Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards…
BILLY COLLINS

Across Airplane Country Reading Towards
You’ll find i-poetry, you’ll find that you can download poetry, that you can stuff your i-pod with recorded poetry. So just to answer the question that way, I think that poetry is gonna catch up with that technology quite soon.
BILLY COLLINS

Answer Technology Thinking
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
I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that’s too many syllables or that’s too many lines or that’s the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you’re in dialogue with the form.
BILLY COLLINS

Alone Dialogue Simply Sonnet Wrong
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

Comprehensible Exposed Real Risk Saying Thinking

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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