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Death is what makes life fun.

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
Fun
Death
Makes
Life

More quotes by 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 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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And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches.
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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I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand.
Billy Collins
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The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.
Billy Collins
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There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.
Billy Collins
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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
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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
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It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.
Billy Collins
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I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.
Billy Collins
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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
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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
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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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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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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
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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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You'll find i-poetry, you'll find that you can download poetry, that you can stuff your i-pod with recorded poetry. So just to answer the question that way, I think that poetry is gonna catch up with that technology quite soon.
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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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