Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Billy Collins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 22
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
William James Collins
Perhaps
Interesting
Unprofitable
Actually
Impenetrable
Enjoy
Penetrate
Difficult
Forms
Form
Difficulty
Mean
Poetry
Wouldn
More quotes by Billy Collins
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
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
Billy Collins
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
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
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
I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
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
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
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
And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches.
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
All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.
Billy Collins
This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
Billy Collins
The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
Billy Collins
You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.
Billy Collins
Death is what makes life fun.
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
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
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
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