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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

Billy Collins

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HeartNamesWall

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More Billy Collins Quotes

• 

  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.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DifferencesDifficultPoetReadingThinking
• 

  Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting.

  BILLY COLLINS
  CleverReadingTalking
• 

  So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

  BILLY COLLINS
  HeartNamesWall
• 

  I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DistractionLeftPathRightThinking
• 

  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
  DegreesExperimentalInsaneKindMoreOften
• 

  Vade Mecum I want the scissors to be sharp and the table perfectly level when you cut me out of my life and paste me in that book you always carry.

  BILLY COLLINS
  BookCuttingLevelsLifeScissors
• 

  Listeners are kind of ambushed… if a poem just happens to be said when they’re listening to the radio. The listener doesn’t have time to deploy what I call their ‘poetry deflector shields’ that were installed in high school – there’s little time to resist the poem.

  BILLY COLLINS
  ListeningRadioSchool
• 

  A motto I’ve adopted is, if at first you don’t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

  BILLY COLLINS
  FirstsMottoSucceed
• 

  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.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DemandingGoesLittlesOnSerious
• 

  I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one’s interested in the experiences of a stranger – let’s put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.

  BILLY COLLINS
  CombinedExperiencePoetryStranger
• 

  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.

  BILLY COLLINS
  CharacterEarthEqiuipvalentResemblesVoice
• 

  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.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AlarmedHumorlessPeopleThinkingWay
• 

  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.

  BILLY COLLINS
  ConnectingInterestingPoemPoetrySense
• 

  I always think W.S. Merwin’s poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin.

  BILLY COLLINS
  Finding YourselfThinkingWriting
• 

  High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DiesHighSchool
• 

  I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together

  BILLY COLLINS
  ForeverTogetherTwo