Billy Collins Quotes About Reading

Quotes about: Reading

• I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow.

  Billy Collins

  Reading, Light, Circles

  Billy Collins (1988). “The Apple that Astonished Paris: Poems”, p.32, University of Arkansas Press

• Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards...I don't know if anyone's reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established.

  Billy Collins

  Country, Reading, Airplane

  "Poet Billy Collins discusses humor, authenticity and ‘Aimless Love’". "PBS Newshour", www.pbs.org. October 29, 2013.

• Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.

  Billy Collins

  Reading, Thinking, Differences

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn't know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.

  Billy Collins

  Clever, Reading, Talking

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.

  Billy Collins

  Moving, Reading, Writing

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets.

  Billy Collins

  Reading, Thinking, Numbers

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that, poets didn't give public readings very often, certainly not - there was no circuit of schools.

  Billy Collins

  Believe, Reading, School

  "Poet Billy Collins discusses humor, authenticity and ‘Aimless Love’". "PBS NewsHour" with Judy Woodruff, www.pbs.org. October 29, 2013.

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