You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight.
BILLY COLLINSI write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I’ll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.
More Billy Collins Quotes
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This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
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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.
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I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
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I find it strange that – at least in my take on it – the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway.
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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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Death is what makes life fun.
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There are just long gaps where I can’t find a point of insertion, I can’t find a good opening line.
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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.
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I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.
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I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
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High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
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The sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader’s part in the poet’s autobiographical life, in the poet’s memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions.
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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.
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So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
BILLY COLLINS -
There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
BILLY COLLINS