Quotes from Billy Collins

I thanked everyone whose job it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers, and I gave general thanks that I was lying facedown in a warm puddle of soap and not a warm puddle of blood in some corner of this incomprehensible city.

If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.

This is the beginning. Almost anything can happen. This is your first night with her, your first night without her. This is the middle. Things have had time to get more complicated, messy really. Nothing is simple anymore. And this is the end. It is me hitting the period and you closing the book.

The fly lands on the swatter. The movie runs backwards and catches fire in the projector. This species apes us well by talking only about itself

A poem is an interruption of silence, whereas prose is a continuation of noise.

though they know in their adult hearts, even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed for his appalling behavior, that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids, their wives are Dopey Dopeheads and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.

When i believe in everything, I could not see the actors semicircled around a studio microphone flipping the pages of scripts in unison. I only heard the voices, resonant, electric, adult, accusing each other of murder.

I had to send away for the beacuse they are not available in any store. They look the same as any sunglasses with a light tint and silvery frames, but instead of filtering out the harmful rays of the sun. they filter out the harmful sight of you --

I can see one of them clearly now, walking along with a newspaper tucked under his arm. he has cut himself shaving and a bit of tissue with a circle of blood is stuck to his cheek

Just pour the tea, just look into the eye of the flower, just sing the song— one thing at a time and

After all, is a gentleman's library of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves anything more than a vanity?

And when my heart is beating too rapidly in the dark, I will go downstairs in a robe, open it up to a blank page, and try to settle on the blue lines whatever it is that seems to be the matter.

Is not poetry a megaphone held up to the whispering lips of death?

Names etched on the head of a pin, one name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel. A blue name needled into the skin, names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers, the bright-eyed daughter, the quick son; alphabet of names in a green field, names in the small tracks of birds, names lifted from a hat or balanced on the tip of the tongue, names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory. So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe There was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.

C'è nessuno che voglia unirsi a me nel lanciare alcuni sassi verso quegli insegnanti che amano porre la domanda: «Che cosa sta cercando di dire il poeta?» come se Thomas Hardy e Emily Dickinson si fossero sforzati ma alla fine avessero fallito: disgraziati incapaci di parlare, che altro non erano, con la penna in bocca a guardare fuori dalla finestra in attesa d'un idea

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.

And the past and the future? Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

I was too young then to see that she was staring into the great mystery just as intently as her sisters, her gorgeous, brown and white, philosophic sisters.

would have to say that the crown resting on the head of my

Neighborhood What do I care that they're tearing down the nice old houses and putting up brutal ones? Before very long, I'll be just a breeze blowing around town, trying to avoid all the wind chimes.

We must always look at things from the point of view of eternity, the college theologians used to insist, from which, I imagine, we would all appear to have speed lines trailing behind us as we rush along the road of the world

New Calendar The poem of next year every week a line, every month a stanza, and a tiny sun rising and setting in every numbered square.

Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin. I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter. I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on. I find it difficult to ignore the temptation. Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.