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Billy Collins
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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
#Back
#Change
#Fast
#Reason
#Try
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
#Everyone
#Fun
#People
#Talk
#Way
There's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can't pretend to be funny.
- Billy Collins
#About
#Funny
#Humor
#Pretend
#Serious
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
#Career
#Dance
#Life
#Love Life
#Love
Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside.
- Billy Collins
#Beginning
#I Am
#Me
#Social
#Welcome
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
#Perfect
#Poetry
#Radio
#Visual
#Voice
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
#Imagination
#Mean
#New
#People
#Poetry
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
#Art
#Own
#Sound
#True
#Vision
I don't write for an auditorium full of people. I don't write for the microphone; I write for the page.
- Billy Collins
#Full
#I Write
#Microphone
#Page
#People
The disappointing second novel is measured against the brilliant first novel - often no novel lives up to the first. Literary improvement seems like an unfair expectation.
- Billy Collins
#Brilliant
#First
#Improvement
#Unfair
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
#DNA
#First
#Key
#Rest
#Trust
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
#Me
#Poetry
#Real
#She
#Travel
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
#Alive
#Being
#Feel
#Inside
#Need
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
#Elegance
#Measure
#Shot
#Top
#Who
People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
- Billy Collins
#Ambiguity
#People
#Poetry
#School
#Taste
I'm an only child, and I can take all the attention you manage to pile on me.
- Billy Collins
#Attention
#Child
#I Can
#Me
#Only Child
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
#Free
#Home
#Poetry
#She
#Uncertainty
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
#Meaning Of
#Meaning
#People
#Poetry
#Us
I have a stack of those plastic card hotel room keys that I picked up on this latest book tour. It's about a yard tall. Ah yes, a stack of lonely nights.
- Billy Collins
#Book
#Hotel Room
#Hotel
#Room
#Tall
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
#Classroom
#Cocktail
#Great
#Places
#Poetry
#Table
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
#I Am
#Media
#Much
#Privacy
#Social Media
I'm easily frightened, and I've also come to realize that old Catholic guilt or remorse is easily stimulated.
- Billy Collins
#Come
#Guilt
#Old
#Realize
#Remorse
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
#Ignore
#Jazz
#Painting
#Play
#Poetry
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
#Discovery
#Pen
#Recording
#Resignation
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
#Funny
#Gate
#Humor
#Me
#Way
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
#He
#Night
#Place
#Poetry
#Transportation
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
#Car
#Music
#Poetry
#Song
#Yourself
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
#Poet
#Poetry
#Position
#Uncomfortable
#Worth
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
#Go
#Marriage
#Me
#Right
#Spark
#They Say
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