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

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

- 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

Write the poem only you can write.

- 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

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