A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark’s spooky novel, ‘Memento Mori.’ – Billy Collins
I try to write very fast. I don’t revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It’s usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I’ll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done. – Billy Collins
I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies, and Loony Tunes cartoons. – Billy Collins
To a poet, it’s quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I’m not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets. – Billy Collins
I’m happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry. – Billy Collins
I’m a nearly uncontrollable Geoff Dyer fan, who I think is one of the most comically brilliant writers today. – Billy Collins
One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else. – Billy Collins
When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, ‘Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.’ – Billy Collins
I don’t want to sound like an aesthete, but one has to be true to the art. And that means being true to the tradition of the art but also being true to your own artistic vision. – Billy Collins
We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry. – 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
Cummings’ career as a writer – and a painter – was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten. – Billy Collins
When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn’t worth reading. – Billy Collins
The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason. – Billy Collins
I’m not a claustrophobe, but you don’t need to be to feel claustrophobic inside an MRI. It’s like being buried alive. – Billy Collins
When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things – it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery. – Billy Collins
I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form. – Billy Collins
Discovering Samuel Beckett in college was a big deal for me. I realized you could be very funny and very dark at the same time. – 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
When you put a book together and arrange it, there’s a lot of anxiety and turmoil about what order the poems should be in. – Billy Collins
Emily Dickinson seems rather tame because she pretty much uses the same meter every time. It’s called ‘common meter.’ It’s a line of four beats that’s followed by a line of three beats. – Billy Collins
I’m all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod. – Billy Collins
I just reached the point where plot-driven novels don’t hold my interest because I don’t care about the fate of characters anymore – whether Emily marries Tom or not, that kind of thing. – Billy Collins
I think ‘accessible’ just means that the reader can walk into the poem without difficulty. The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. – Billy Collins
I’m a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I’d rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program. – Billy Collins
I first came across ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats. – Billy Collins
The obituaries shot up to the top of my list when I discovered Robert McG. Thomas, the ‘Times’ obit writer who redesigned its traditional form and added a measure of stylistic elegance. – 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