Billy Collins Quotes
I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.
Quotes to Explore
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The more success you get, you start to be harder on yourself or more afraid of the looking glass. You have to learn to build a thicker skin because people are paying more attention.
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I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.'
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When you're bullied in high school, even if it's the smallest amount, or you're actually tortured, I feel like everybody carries that with them. They always think of that one person who treated them badly in high school.
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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
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Relationships can be very traumatic. But being in a healthy relationship can be very empowering.
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If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't.
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I think my parents see my life now as very conservative.
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For me beauty is valued more than anything - the beauty that is manifest in a curved line or in an act of creativity.
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Animals awaken, first facially, then bodily. Men's bodies wake before their faces do. The animal sleeps within its body, man sleeps with his body in his mind.
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Growing up on a mountain in Tennessee, I spent most of my childhood outside.
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I wouldn't say I'm vain - I'm just in a job where the way you look is important. Well, at least the facelift wasn't vanity, but the hair was.
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Living in Malibu is like being in a bubble, so discovering others that are so different from me has been incredibly gratifying.
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They say women and music should never be dated.
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The hard work definitely paid off and hard work always does.
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The days of the painter at the Bauhaus appear to be truly over. They are estranged from the actual core of present activities, and their influence is more restricting than inspiring.
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Whether I build a character from the ground up or develop one, whether within my own copyright or in licensed work, I can step into that character's mind. It takes a kind of voluntary dissociation akin to method acting, military planning, marketing, or detective work: to think like the other guy and work out what he's going to do next.
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When you play piano, your left hand and right hand are synced. Your brain basically has a clock, so that the right hand knows that 0.3 seconds after I hit this key, I need to hit that one. And the right hand knows not to hit keys that the left hand is playing, so the hands do not collide.
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To some extent, the act of creation and the act of selling are hard to disentangle. If you create something, whether it's a painting or a company, I think if you care about it, you have some obligation to go out and tell people about it.
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I wasn't made to take orders. My grandmother used to tell me: 'Laws are for idiots.' She was right.
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We want to allow Costa Ricans to make a qualitative leap in our development and go to an economy based on innovation and developing a broadband infrastructure in order to overcome the barrier of 15 per cent penetration.
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At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
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It was an experience that was exceptional. People frequently ask what it was like and it truly was inspiring. Sometimes during his lifetime, people would try and put him on a pedestal and that's not where he wanted to be, but he was really a great individual.
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I have always wanted to do a book about actors because I think that the death of a character is a tremendously emotional experience.
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I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.
