Billy Collins Quotes

I do, however, think it would be difficult to write books I don't like to read.

The response to 'A Head Full of Ghosts' has been amazing and thrilling. I'd be lying if I said I don't feel a little extra pressure trying to follow it up.

It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.

Try writing a book, dude. That's difficult.

I'm the first to admit that I can't be as good as Tolkien, and a movie can never be as good as Tolkien.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'

If you write a book that's as powerful and successful as 'Bastard,' there's a strong desire to prove there's something else.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

If someone said, 'Sit down and write a 'Community' episode,' I would be panicked.

Some people make a great film and then they can't follow up.

For a lot of people, becoming an author is a change in occupation... they are coming from something that totally has nothing to do with this. If they are expecting to come into a room full of people praising them, then they are in the wrong place.

Whenever anyone calls me 'The new J..K. Rowling,' I think, 'What's wrong with the old one?'

I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.

The bane of my existence is the synopses that publishers request for a new novel or series. That's where I'm really producing fiction - my final book never ends up looking like the synopsis.

Of course, there are those critics - New York critics as a rule - who say, 'Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it's good but then she's a natural writer.' Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

I can't write a book like 'Lamb' or 'Fool' every year. It just takes too much research and craft.

One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.

The difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems.

I've always found the second book in a series is the hardest to write.

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That's how 'Beyond This Dark House' appeared.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

I'm crushed by the responsibility of writing a satirical book.

I wish I could write easily. I'm one of those guys who's visited by the muse when things are dire.