Billy Collins Quotes

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

• Poetry

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Quotes to Explore

• Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

  

  Joanne Rowling
  • Myself
  • Poetry
  • Now And Then

• I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

  

  Felix Dennis
  • People
  • Care
  • Poetry

• I think poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have.

  

  Natasha Trethewey
  • Think
  • Faith
  • Poetry

• If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

  

  Wallace Stevens
  • Poetry
  • Bible
  • Same

• I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

  

  Pablo Neruda
  • Up
  • Poetry
  • Rain

• A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

  

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko
  • Poetry
  • Poet
  • Anything

• Do-gooders are easily overlooked. We're supposed to be soft, touchy-feely types, who wear Birkenstocks, compost everything, and write poetry by candlelight.

  

  Nancy Lublin
  • Poetry
  • Everything
  • Soft

• Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

  

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
  • Music
  • Art
  • Poetry

• I didn't necessarily have a total idea when I was writing the movie of where everything was going. I just wanted to have really realistic dialogue and write like people I knew talked. I tried to keep it very real.

  

  Zach Braff
  • People
  • Writing
  • Real

• Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.

  

  Ian Hamilton Finlay
  • Up
  • Different
  • Bad

• I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it's poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.

  

  Taylor Swift
  • Work
  • Simple
  • Poetry

• On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

  

  Joanne Rowling
  • Passion
  • Poetry
  • Person

• Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

  

  T. S. Eliot
  • Want
  • Poetry
  • Personality

• Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

  

  Octavio Paz
  • Experience
  • Poetry
  • Risks

• Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.

  

  Orson F. Whitney
  • History
  • Mother
  • Poetry

• The Scottish Highlands are incredible. There seems to be magic and poetry everywhere.

  

  Caitriona Balfe
  • Poetry
  • Magic
  • Seems

• Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do.

  

  Vikram Seth
  • Life
  • Good
  • Important

• One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

  

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
  • Poetry
  • Philosophy
  • Morality

• For the last 15 years that I have been performing, all I ever wanted to do was transcend poetry to the world. See, it wasn't enough for me to write a book. It wasn't enough for me to join a slam competition, and while those things hold weight, it wasn't the driving force that pushes the pen to the pad.

  

  Lemon Andersen
  • World
  • Book
  • Poetry

• Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.

  

  David Lee Roth Van Halen
  • Music
  • Poetry
  • Rap

• As musicians it's often difficult. You go to a dinner party and most people treat you like some kind of exotic animal and in a way like you don't have any problems and that it's all fantastic and glamorous and that you wake up in the morning, you kick the groupies out of bed, you roll onto the floor onto a needle, right, which fills you with a lovely substance, you roll into the gutter and you stare at the moon and out comes beautiful poetry. The fact of the matter is that that's nonsense. It's a lot of hard work.

  

  Brian Molko Placebo
  • Party
  • Poetry
  • Musicians

• You tell me, since Independence, in the field of justice delivery, has so much work been accomplished anywhere? But, for news traders, these things perhaps are not saleable. Now you tell me if these things are pro-poor or not.

  

  Narendra Modi
  • Work
  • Justice

• You can't change the feeling but you can change your feelings about the feeling in a second or two

  

  David Berman
  • Feeling
  • Change
  • Second

• 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
  • Poetry