Quotes from Billy Collins

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.'

And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches.

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.

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.

I think it's good not to make demands on the reader too early. But as the poem goes on, I want the journey of the poem to lead into some interesting places.

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.

I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

I'll listen to anything authentic whether it's bluegrass or gospel or blues.

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.

In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.

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.

All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.

When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

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.

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.

I'm easily frightened, and I've also come to realize that old Catholic guilt or remorse is easily stimulated.

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.

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.

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.

Of all the questions you might want to askabout angels, the only one you ever hearis how many can dance on the head of a pin.No curiosity about how they pass the eternal timebesides circling the Throne chanting in Latinor delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earthor guiding a boy and a girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

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