Billy Collins

“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 t...”

“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 o...”

“I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fres...”

“It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women, anonymous faces on the...”

“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...”

“I could feel the day offering itself to me, and I wanted nothing more than to be in the moment-but which moment? Not that one, or that one, or that one,”

“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.”

“Japan Today I pass the time reading a favorite haiku, saying the few words over and over. It feels like eating the same small, perfect grape again and again. I walk through the house recitin...”

“I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.”

“No one here likes a wet dog.”

“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 uncertai...”

“Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows sil...”

“I don't write for an auditorium full of people. I don't write for the microphone; I write for the page.”

“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.”

“I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.”

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

“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.”

“Emily Dickinson never developed. She remained loyal to her persona and to that same little metrical song that stood her in such good stead. She is a striking example of complexity within a s...”

“I really have a distaste for poets who announce themselves at 50 yards; you know, here he comes, you know, with the beret and the cane and the cape and the whatever - whatever mishegas is pa...”

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