Billy Collins Quotes

I think about the sentence a long time, and then I write it. I don't revise it once it's set down.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.

If I'm working on a poem, it's at the forefront of my mind; I'm working on it when I'm cooking dinner or stretched out on the sofa. But if I don't really have it by the 10th draft, I know it just isn't going to jell.

When it comes to lyrics, I just write down a lot of things, and only a very tiny fraction of it, I think, is any good.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.

If I were to try to describe the way in which I write, the only word I would use without qualification is 'slowly.'

The way I outline has changed quite a bit from when I first started writing.

I'm still very much a believer in the spontaneity of certain kinds of writing. But then you have to eventually, when you're writing a long play, make adjustments along the way - all kinds of adjustments.

I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft.

I am a hopeless pantser, so I don't do much outlining. A thought will occur to me, and I'll just throw it into the story. I tell myself I'll worry about untangling it later. I'm glad no one sees my first drafts except for my poor editor and agent.

Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.

Even if you plan your book, the actual writing is unplanned.

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it.

When I'm my own editor, there's very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes.

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

In a first draft, I concentrate on moving forward and trying not to panic.

When I'm writing a first draft of a script, I can disappear into that for two, three months exclusively.

I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft.

I used to do three or four songs a day, just write them - boom, boom, boom, and done - because of how spontaneous I was.

I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.