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

• We were not for underestimating magic - a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die.

  

  Freya Stark
  • Life
  • Die
  • Poetry

• I was first influenced by a friend in fifth grade when he brought a Walkman to school and was listening to 'Paradise City' by Guns 'N Roses, which he had concealed within his hoodie. He put the headphones over my ears and I was completely blown away by what I heard. I'll never forget that.

  

  Darren Robinson
  • School
  • City
  • Friend

• Religious freedom, often referred to as the first freedom, is of central import to the American experiment. As such it should feature prominently in U.S. foreign policy.

  

  Frank Wolf
  • American
  • Freedom
  • Religious

• Hip-hop is universal now, it's all commercial now. It's like a circle full of circus clowns up in the circuit now.

  

  Marshall Bruce Mathers III Bad Meets Evil'
  • Circles
  • Circus
  • Clown

• The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain't half full.

  

  Cormac McCarthy
  • God
  • Men
  • Power

• 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