Billy Collins Quotes

Sometimes I'm on the pulse of what's happening in Hollywood, but other times, I'm just totally absorbed by what I'm creating on the easel.

Many friends have said to me, 'I never know when you write your books, because I've never seen you writing, or even seen you go away to write.' I must behave rather as dogs do when they retire with a bone; they depart in a secretive manner and you do not see them again for an odd half hour. They return self-consciously with mud on their noses. I do much the same.

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

I don't want real life necessarily to be seen only as a context to heighten the deepness my work.

But I never listen to music while I'm writing.

I've never detected a correlation between where I am and what I write. I think there could be something subconscious, though. And I can't really speak for my subconscious.

My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.

I never listen to music when I'm writing.

I'm always a great student of writers' work habits. Balzac sat at his desk dressed in a monk's robe, and he always had to have a rotten apple on his desk. The smell of the apple inspired him somehow.

All artists draw from their lives, except they mask it and camouflage it... which is the smarter way to do it.

You should not think of business while performing your art. This advice holds true for every artiste, irrespective of what he is doing.

When it comes to art, you just need to be focused on doing a great thing. Not thinking all about the business.

I like drawing from all kinds of territories in art.

The Demon character is something I draw on occasion. It's something that requires a lot of focus to tap into and really requires the right situation for me to sort of draw on that darker side of my personality.

My models, my human figures, are never like extras in an interior. They are the main theme of my work. I depend absolutely on my model.

I can't understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism. Despite the general pessimistic attitude in the world today, I am nothing but an optimist.

I took a complete year off the road, but a big part of that year was making 'The Big Revival.' I needed that down time just so I could concentrate. The one thing that starts it all for us is the music. That's what you create in the studio. That's where the magic happens.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.

I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women... There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night... Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures.

When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

Generally I start writing when I have even the smallest idea of how a book is going to go, because the physical process of writing itself keeps the mind active and focused on the job at hand. Usually I write in about 5 drafts, but that simply means there are 5 definite times when I go in a linear fashion from the beginning to the end of the book.

The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses