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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

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Billy Collins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 22
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
William James Collins
Book
Sharp
Always
Perfectly
Life
Table
Tables
Carry
Cutting
Level
Paste
Levels
Scissors

More quotes by Billy Collins

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But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.
Billy Collins
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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. 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
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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
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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
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I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow.
Billy Collins
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You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.
Billy Collins
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I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.
Billy Collins
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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
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Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is that it's always your turn - I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it's under way, there is a sense of flow.
Billy Collins
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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.
Billy Collins
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And strangely enoughthe only emotion I ever feel, is what the beaver must feel, as he bears each stick to his hidden construction, which creates the tranquil pond and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle, and the pair of swans a place to conceal their young
Billy Collins
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All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.
Billy Collins
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The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.
Billy Collins
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But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.
Billy Collins
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I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
Billy Collins
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The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
Billy Collins
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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
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I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
Billy Collins
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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
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When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.
Billy Collins