I’m going through life’s cycles at an alarmingly fast pace, but my persona has a Peter Pan quality: he doesn’t age. Billy Collins Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don’t write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me. Billy Collins Read Quote
I don’t write for an auditorium full of people. I don’t write for the microphone; I write for the page. Billy Collins Read Quote
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. Billy Collins Read Quote
When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things – it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery. Billy Collins Read Quote
I don’t think I’ve ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I’ve written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious. Billy Collins Read Quote
I’m a nearly uncontrollable Geoff Dyer fan, who I think is one of the most comically brilliant writers today. Billy Collins Read Quote
I’ll listen to anything authentic whether it’s bluegrass or gospel or blues. Billy Collins Read Quote
