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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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More Billy Collins Quotes

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  Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There’s always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I’d say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it’s too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.

  BILLY COLLINS
  OncePleasurableSittingThinkingWriting
• 

  This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation

  BILLY COLLINS
  DayEveryEyeNaturalThings
• 

  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 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.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AnymoreFactsJobsSerious
• 

  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.

  BILLY COLLINS
  GapsIgnoredPoetThemselvesWorld
• 

  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 was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels – children and poets both tend to feel.

  BILLY COLLINS
  ChildChildrenOnlyParent
• 

  To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness.

  BILLY COLLINS
  ConsciousnessLinesMeanWriting
• 

  There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.

  BILLY COLLINS
  GoesOnThinkingUnconscious
• 

  But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.

  BILLY COLLINS
  BirdLightOffering
• 

  I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.

  BILLY COLLINS
  GodLookingRemarkableSaintSomething
• 

  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
• 

  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’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.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AttentionConsciousPoemProgress
• 

  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
• 

  Poems are not easy to start, and they’re not easy to finish. There’s a great pleasure in – I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DifferenceEaseGraduationKindWriting