Quote

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

Billy Collins

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Billy Collins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 22
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
William James Collins
Needs
Move
Love
Inside
Like
Wish
Balancing
Moving
Puzzle
Lost
Mouse
Found
Puzzles
Body
Mice
Need
Contradiction

More quotes by Billy Collins

Image
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
Image
All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.
Billy Collins
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
Billy Collins
Image
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
Image
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
Billy Collins
Image
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
Image
And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches.
Billy Collins
Image
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
Image
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?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
Billy Collins
Image
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
Image
I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
Billy Collins
Image
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
Image
You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.
Billy Collins
Image
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
Image
Another trouble with poetry - and I'm gonna stop the list at two - is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader's part in the poet's autobiographical life, in the poet's memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions.
Billy Collins
Image
I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
Billy Collins
Image
One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you.
Billy Collins
Image
There are just long gaps where I can't find a point of insertion, I can't find a good opening line, I can't find a mood that I want to write into. But once I do, once a line falls out of the air, or I get a little inkling of a subject and I recognize that, it's like the sense that a game has started.
Billy Collins