Inspirational Quotes, Motivational Sayings, and Wise Words for Daily Inspiration

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I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when "Howl" and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot of other new things were popping up. (Again I'm trying to give you a finite version of this career.) And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens when I was in college and graduate school, and basically set as a life goal the ambition of writing third-rate Wallace Stevens. I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.

Billy Collins's Popular Quotes

The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're igno…

- Billy Collins

It's time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkab…

- Billy Collins

But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the p…

- Billy Collins

In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

- Billy Collins

I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and righ…

- Billy Collins

Write the poem only you can write.

- Billy Collins

The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.

- Billy Collins

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

- Billy Collins

A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

- Billy Collins