Billy Collins Quotes

And I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it - which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

I probably could be a world-class screenwriter by now if I had spent the kind of work I devote on Comedy Death-Ray to that. But I do okay, in that regard. I mean, my stuff gets bought, so it's all right.

I write a good amount. I've been gathering up a backlog of stuff and maybe I'll do something with it someday, but I don't want to talk about it just yet because that would jinx it.

I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday.

The idea of being a novelist is really romantic, but it's kind of the same as being president of the United States - it's not gonna happen.

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

I always thought it'd be fun to write something, but it never was an ambition of mine, per se.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'

I don't think there was a time I ever thought of myself as anything but a writer. I thought I was going to be the next Toni Morrison.

'Some day,' I said, 'I will be an author.'

I never really read Allen Ginsberg poetry, even though I have a book he gave me.

I just love film making; all aspects of it. I love the idea of writing but I just don't feel like I could really do it. I didn't even graduate from school.

I have decided that maybe I want to write when I grow up. I just don't know what I would write.

I don't know what drives me to succeed. I know I want to always do the best I can.I guess I was maybe in little league baseball as far as I wanted to be good at that. But school, I certainly wasn't the best at that.

For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

You want to write something as good as what you've read.

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.

My great joy is to give form to reality. Music is a great release, a great enjoyment to me. Eventually I'd like to write something of great importance. That's my ambition - to write something worthwhile.

Allen [ Ginsberg] was a particular friend, one of my heroes, really. I knew him almost as long as I've been writing.

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.

I hadn't read or heard a lot about [Tom] Wolfe until I read this script, and in that way I think it was really clever to write a piece about him instead of Max Perkins,[Ernest] Hemingway, [John] Fitzgerald, or others that people have strong opinions of already.

I started as a journalist actually. I graduated from Northwestern Medill School of Journalism and with my degree discovered, once out in the real world, I wasn't very good at it.