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.

Billy Collins

• Happy
• Death
• Lost
• Poetry

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• 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.

  

  Idina Menzel
  • People
  • Success
  • Attention

• 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.'

  

  Ira Glass
  • Job
  • Wish
  • Day

• 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.

  

  Odette Annable
  • School
  • High
  • Think

• 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.

  

  Hannah Arendt
  • Up
  • Power
  • Know

• Relationships can be very traumatic. But being in a healthy relationship can be very empowering.

  

  Kangana Ranaut
  • Relationship
  • Healthy
  • Empowering

• 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.

  

  Larry Wall
  • Money
  • Individual
  • Pay

• For me beauty is valued more than anything - the beauty that is manifest in a curved line or in an act of creativity.

  

  Oscar Niemeyer
  • Me
  • Beauty
  • Creativity

• 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.

  

  Malcolm de Chazal
  • Men
  • Mind
  • Man

• Growing up on a mountain in Tennessee, I spent most of my childhood outside.

  

  Rachel Boston
  • Up
  • Growing
  • Childhood

• 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.

  

  Gary Numan
  • Important
  • Job
  • Hair

• Living in Malibu is like being in a bubble, so discovering others that are so different from me has been incredibly gratifying.

  

  Kaia Gerber
  • Me
  • Discovering
  • Incredibly

• They say women and music should never be dated.

  

  Oliver Goldsmith
  • Music
  • Women
  • Never

• The hard work definitely paid off and hard work always does.

  

  Gabby Douglas
  • Work
  • Always
  • Hard Work

• 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.

  

  Walter Gropius
  • Present
  • Influence
  • More

• 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.

  

  Karen Traviss
  • Up
  • Work
  • Mind

• 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.

  

  Vijay Kumar
  • Hand
  • Brain
  • Hands

• 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.

  

  Dan Pink
  • People
  • Care
  • Painting

• I learned a tremendous amount about dialogue because I suffered as an actor.

  

  Taylor Sheridan
  • Actor
  • Learned
  • Because

• There'd be days in high school where I thought I played well, my team got the win, and I'd go to the gym still in my uniform, and my dad would say, 'C'mon, let's go. We have more work to do.'

  

  Jalen Brunson
  • Work
  • School
  • High

• Hmmm... I never get the answer I think I'm going to get.

  

  Kate O'Brien
  • Think
  • Never
  • Answer

• If you can get a laugh out of a name, you're ahead of the game.

  

  Carl Reiner
  • Game
  • Name
  • Laugh

• If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

  

  Lascelles Abercrombie
  • Fall
  • Poetry
  • Epic

• I would say that I began with a very edgy, very driven personality and after a sufficient amount of therapy over many, many years, I managed to become rather relaxed and happy.

  

  John Cleese
  • Happy
  • Personality
  • Edgy

• 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.

  

  Billy Collins
  • Happy
  • Death
  • Lost