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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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Billy Collins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 22
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
William James Collins
Writing
Flames
Appear
Wait
Waiting
Dark
Ends
Pencil
Littles
Pencils
Little
Flame
More quotes by Billy Collins
This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
Billy Collins
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
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
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
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
There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about finding your own voice as a poet, which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice.
Billy Collins
The first line is the DNA of the poem the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.
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
I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
Billy Collins
I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
Billy Collins
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
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
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
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
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
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
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
But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.
Billy Collins
I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.
Billy Collins
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
