Quotations

"I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"Death is what makes life fun."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"Introduction to Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"This is not what it is like to be you, I realized as a few of your magnificent clouds flew over the rooftop. It is just me thinking about being you. And before I headed back down the hill, I walked in a circle around your house, making an invisible line which you would have to cross before dark."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"Do what you love, and you will find the way to get it out to the world."

— Judy Collins, American singer, born 1939

"I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let's say 100,000 miles, their outlook would be fundamentally changed.
The all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment.
The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied."

— Michael Collins, American astronaut, born 1930