Billy Collins Quotes

I do think that we all draw limits and I feel like part of the work of an artist is it shouldn't be fun. This shouldn't be comfortable. I'm not looking to make people feel unsafe, but I am looking to make people feel uncomfortable.

Art is difficult.

Making television is difficult. Making any art is difficult.

If I could put in 100 per cent effort to make a film, then a dance film would require that I put in 200 per cent. Making a regular film is much easier.

I do note that photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people. That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium.

Nothing so difficult as a beginning In poesy, unless perhaps the end.

It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

I'm always proud and pleased when people do my songs. It gives me pleasure that they even attempt them, because a lot of my songs aren't that doable.

So, some of the most difficult formal poems that I've written, say one sentence sonnets, I've been able to do those fairly quickly whereas some of the clearest, simplest lyrics that I've written have taken me the longest to get to the clarity of feeling that you're looking for.

I like art that challenges you and makes a lot of people angry because they don't get it. Because they refuse to look at it properly. Rather than open their mind to the possibility of seeing something, they just resist. A lot of people think contemporary art makes them feel stupid. Because they are stupid. They're right. If you have contempt about contemporary art, you are stupid. You can be the most uneducated person in the world and completely appreciate contemporary art, because you see the rebellion. You see that it's trying to change things.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

I could not live by literature if only to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.

My hope is that I'm going to continue to make more and more challenging work that's going to come out more and more interesting. I don't know if that will always continue to happen, but every one of my films has definitely been a progression as far as complexity of narrative, character, and plot.

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.

To extract beauty from one's own milieu is one of the most difficult tasks of art.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

A violent scene is art, as much as a sex scene is art. For me, all the scenes were a challenge.

I think the most important thing for me is a challenge. I'm not happy, creatively, unless I'm faced with a challenge. So, overcoming those challenges and really discovering characters that aren't like me helps me grow, as a person and as an artist.

It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.

It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.

Painting is as difficult as brain surgery. It's not that relaxing. But that's the discipline.

The lyrics aren't simple, either. They're extremely difficult because I'm trying to say complicated things in as few words as possible.

Shakespeare, Butler and Bacon have rendered it extremely difficult for all who come after them to be sublime, witty or profound.

I love to perform and I love to perform characters, and sometimes when I'm doing television and film, I just feel like I'm making a living. I'm good at it, but I'm not really being artistically challenged.