Now that I’m older, a real source of interest is the ages of the dead, the number; the day is off to an optimistic start when the departed are all older than I. – Billy Collins
I really have a distaste for poets who announce themselves at 50 yards; you know, here he comes, you know, with the beret and the cane and the cape and the whatever – whatever mishegas is part of the outfit there. – 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
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
I’m very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader. – Billy Collins
I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else. – Billy Collins
My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I’m initiating something, or I’m making a move. – Billy Collins
I have my Poetry 180 project, which I’ve made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that’s really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits. – Billy Collins
I don’t think I’ve ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I’ve written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious. – Billy Collins
Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It’s 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
Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield. – Billy Collins
Very few people have actually read Freud, but everyone seems prepared to talk about him in that Woody Allen way. To read Freud is not as much fun. – Billy Collins
I learned snails don’t have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence. – Billy Collins
Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure. – Billy Collins
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
I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don’t write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me. – Billy Collins
I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times – and this, I think, is a sense you develop – I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum – the poem finds a reason for continuing. – Billy Collins
When you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet’s decision, it becomes the device’s decision. – Billy Collins
I’m pretty much all for poetry in public places – poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes. – Billy Collins
Poems are perfect for something to listen to while you’re walking around because they don’t take very long. – Billy Collins
I’m easily frightened, and I’ve also come to realize that old Catholic guilt or remorse is easily stimulated. – Billy Collins
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
For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I’m not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore. – Billy Collins
I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty. – Billy Collins
A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I’m locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem. – Billy Collins
I am a nonparticipant of social media. I’m not much attracted to anything that involves the willing forfeiture of privacy and the foregrounding of insignificance. – Billy Collins
One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people’s heads as they listen in the car. You don’t have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it’s just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it. – Billy Collins
I did try to write stories in college because I was interested in writing, and I was interested in the sound of language, but I was just no good at narrative and at fiction. – Billy Collins