It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life. — Billy Collins

Life is a loaded gun that looks right at you with a yellow eye. — Billy Collins

Death is what makes life fun. — Billy Collins

Cummings’ career as a writer–and a painter–was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten. — Billy Collins

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

When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple–minded maybe. — Billy Collins

One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else. — Billy Collins

I knew that poets seemed to be miserable. — Billy Collins

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

The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason. — Billy Collins

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane. — Billy Collins

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

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

It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead. — Billy Collins

All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time. — Billy Collins

When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don’t have time to deploy your anti–poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school. — Billy Collins

A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I’m locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem. — Billy Collins

And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches. — Billy Collins

Emily Dickinson seems rather tame because she pretty much uses the same meter every time. It’s called ‘common meter.’ It’s a line of four beats that’s followed by a line of three beats. — Billy Collins

Billy Taupe had crossed her, and he’d ended up dead. — Suzanne Collins

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

I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read. — Billy Collins

High School is the place where poetry goes to die. — Billy Collins

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn’t worth reading. — Billy Collins

Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there’s no visual distraction. — Billy Collins

I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty. — Billy Collins

The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry… — Billy Collins

In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th–century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings. — Billy Collins

People think of poetry as a school subject… Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don’t have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover. — Billy Collins

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. — Billy Collins

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

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships. — Billy Collins

To a poet, it’s quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I’m not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets. — Billy Collins

Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos. — Billy Collins

I’m a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I’d rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program. — Billy Collins

I think ‘accessible’ just means that the reader can walk into the poem without difficulty. The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. — Billy Collins

I think it’s good not to make demands on the reader too early. But as the poem goes on, I want the journey of the poem to lead into some interesting places. — Billy Collins

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems. — Billy Collins

Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results in all cases. And the poem, if it’s written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed. — Billy Collins

Often people, when they’re confronted with a poem, it’s like someone who keep saying ‘what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?’ And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers. — Billy Collins

When you put a book together and arrange it, there’s a lot of anxiety and turmoil about what order the poems should be in. — Billy Collins

I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry. — Billy Collins

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word ‘accessible.’ — Billy Collins