Billy Collins Quotes

I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think.

A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative.

The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster When you take your pill it's like a mine disaster. I think of all the people lost inside you.

I am very fond of the people, landscape, poetry, music, history and the Guinness. Being there makes me think of my mother and my grandmother - always sentimental and warm thoughts.

A lot of times, people think they're the only ones that feel a certain way.

Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink.

People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.

I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed - it is, indeed, unavoidable.

I have to live my life. I have a family and I just think it's absurd to let other people influence the way you live.

I think I understand life. I think I understand how to live. I'm enjoying my life. I don't really live in an as extravagant a way as people think.

Nothing is as universal as some good scatalogical humor. I try to shift the frame in which people think about poetry from being distant or "sacred" to being more human, because then I think it becomes easier to feel like poetry belongs to us, is for us, is from us.

Like many people, I think I'm my own worst critic. And I think I take a lot out in an internally abusive way, looking at how I measure up, which usually was never enough. I never, never was as good as someone else.

Sometimes people say something to you and you're like, "I respect you so much, I love what you do, but I disagree. I don't think that's right for the way I see it."

I'm not going to change the way people think about me, but I can say you know what? I'm not going to carry that in my backpack.

I never send a story off until I have read it aloud to at least two or three people. Because when I read - and I don't need their criticism, what I need is my own - when I read it aloud, there is a flow, there is a poetry to it.

If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

The word vegetarian, I think, does a disservice because there are a lot of people who care but maybe don't care, or can't care in an ultimate way. If you think about environmentalism, nobody would ask, "Are you an environmentalist or not?" The question doesn't make any sense.

Change the way people think and things will never be the same

Most people think it's the other way around: that time is going faster and we're doing less. But really time seems to be going faster because we're cramming so much into it.

Maybe I'm seeing myself in a different way than the people in the audience see me, 'cause to me, I think I look like a ballerina and I feel like a ballerina. But maybe I'm not seeing what other people are seeing.

I appreciate good criticism and I think it's really important. I don't like it when it's consumer advocacy, like how you should spend your $60. Great criticism is a kind of literature. I've written some criticism, and I really enjoy it because I think it's important for people to know that theatre is vital. Criticism is really unevenly distributed in this town. Obviously the power of the Times is discouraging. It's killing new plays, demolishing one after another.

[Jerome David] Salinger was really taken to the cleaners by nasty critics in his day. I think Joan Didion was one of the people who attacked him in a very unfair way.

One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way.

I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even if they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to the very soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.

Should, is the worst word in the English language. People always think things "should" be a certain way, and when they're not, they're disappointed.