Billy Collins Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• Write the poem only you can write.

  Billy Collins

  Writing

• You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Voice, Style

• And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Eye, Together

  Billy Collins (2012). “Nine Horses”, p.30, Pan Macmillan

• I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Dark, Flames

• The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Trouble, Poetry Is

  Billy Collins (2012). “The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems”, p.85, Pan Macmillan

• To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness. I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that's too many syllables or that's too many lines or that's the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you're in dialogue with the form.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Mean, Lines

  "Poet Billy Collins discusses humor, authenticity and ‘Aimless Love’". Interview with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. October 29, 2013.

• I'm speaking to someone I'm trying to get to fall in love with me. I'm trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I'm not speaking to an audience. I'm not writing for the podium. I'm just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I'm trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.

  Billy Collins

  Falling In Love, Writing, Silence

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

• 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

  Writing, Ambition, School

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

• As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing - and I think that this is important for all writers - I'm trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I'll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Thinking, Two

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

• There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Mean, Voice

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

• When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Thinking, Trying

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

• I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.

  Billy Collins

  Notebook, Writing, Doors

• 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 always think W.S. Merwin's poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin. My poems could easily evaporate. So I don't know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Thinking, Finding Yourself

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

• I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Journey, Imagination

• Poems are not easy to start, and they're not easy to finish. There's a great pleasure in - I wouldn't say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Ease, Be Kind

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

• There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice. But I think you could also put it a different way. You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Character, Mean

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Discovery, Agendas

• There are just long gaps where I can't find a point of insertion, I can't find a good opening line, I can't find a mood that I want to write into. But once I do, once a line falls out of the air, or I get a little inkling of a subject and I recognize that, it's like the sense that a game has started.

  Billy Collins

  Fall, Writing, Air

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

• The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.

  Billy Collins

  Real, Writing, Thinking

• Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is that it's always your turn - I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it's under way, there is a sense of flow.

  Billy Collins

  Children, Writing, Games

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

• I can't picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I'm making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.

  Billy Collins

  Fun, Writing, Thinking

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

• Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it's too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Thinking, Sitting

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

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