A motto I’ve adopted is, if at first you don’t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.
BILLY COLLINSI’m very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of the poem. And that the ending of the line is a way of turning the reader’s attention back into the interior of the poem.
More Billy Collins Quotes
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The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion,
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Bugs Bunny is my muse.
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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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But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.
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Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards…
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I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.
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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.
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I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
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No one here likes a wet dog.
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You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
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A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole’s charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs.
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…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
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The literary world is so full of pretension, and there’s such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they’re ignored by everybody else.
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Death is what makes life fun.
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While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
BILLY COLLINS