• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

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

Related Topics

HeartNamesWall

Popular Authors

Marilyn Monroe Paulo Coelho Abraham Lincoln C. S. Lewis Khalil Gibran Charlie Chaplin Gautama Buddha Isaac Newton

Prevoius|

More Billy Collins Quotes

• 

  The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion,

  BILLY COLLINS
  ConclusionFishingMemoriesNovelPhones
• 

  I can’t picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I’m making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.

  BILLY COLLINS
  FunThinkingWriting
• 

  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
• 

  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
  PoemRealThinkingWriting
• 

  I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

  BILLY COLLINS
  MiserablePoetSchool
• 

  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.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DepartureFunnyMeanThings
• 

  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 COLLINS
  LaughingSelfThinking
• 

  As soon as I start to write I’m very aware, I’m trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I’m writing – and I think that this is important for all writers – I’m trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AwareStrangerThinkingTryingTwoWriting
• 

  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
  AlphabeticalBookCountryNightPeopleShelvesSon
• 

  I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

  BILLY COLLINS
  KindObscureRudeness
• 

  Humor is just an ingredient. It’s always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it’s found its way back. And it’s simply an ingredient.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DroppedFoundIngriidientPoetrySimply
• 

  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
  AcrossAirplaneCountryReadingTowards
• 

  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
  AnyoneCountryEstablishedGoingLectern
• 

  I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AcrossAntConfessionPoemShoreWaving
• 

  My poems could easily evaporate. So I don’t know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something.

  BILLY COLLINS
  PoemPosteritySomethingThinkingWalk
• 

  But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

  BILLY COLLINS
  ArrowsFieldsHeart