I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there’s always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.
BILLY COLLINSI’m speaking to someone I’m trying to get to fall in love with me. I’m trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I’m not speaking to an audience. I’m not writing for the podium.
More Billy Collins Quotes
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All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
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In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
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I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we’re drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.
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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.
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While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
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Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.
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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 stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky.
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You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.
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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.
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(Again I’m trying to give you a finite version of this career.) And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens when I was in college and graduate school, and basically set as a life goal the ambition of writing third-rate Wallace Stevens.
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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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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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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.
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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