Poetry Quotes
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I'm not a claustrophobe, but you don't need to be to feel claustrophobic inside an MRI. It's like being buried alive.
Quote by -Billy Collins
I just reached the point where plot-driven novels don't hold my interest because I don't care about the fate of characters anymore - whether Emily marries Tom or not, that kind of thing.
Quote by -Billy Collins
Discovering Samuel Beckett in college was a big deal for me. I realized you could be very funny and very dark at the same time.
Quote by -Billy Collins
Very few people have actually read Freud, but everyone seems prepared to talk about him in that Woody Allen way. To read Freud is not as much fun.
Quote by -Billy Collins
When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.
Quote by -Billy Collins
I'm an only child, and I can take all the attention you manage to pile on me.
Quote by -Billy Collins
For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.
Quote by -Billy Collins
People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
Quote by -Billy Collins
My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.
Quote by -Billy Collins
When you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet's decision, it becomes the device's decision.
Quote by -Billy Collins
To a poet, it's quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I'm not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets.
Quote by -Billy Collins
I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.
Quote by -Billy Collins
Poems are perfect for something to listen to while you're walking around because they don't take very long.
Quote by -Billy Collins
I learned snails don't have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence.
Quote by -Billy Collins
I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.
Quote by -Billy Collins
I'm easily frightened, and I've also come to realize that old Catholic guilt or remorse is easily stimulated.
Quote by -Billy Collins
I did try to write stories in college because I was interested in writing, and I was interested in the sound of language, but I was just no good at narrative and at fiction.
Quote by -Billy Collins
When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, 'Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.'
Quote by -Billy Collins
In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.
Quote by -Billy Collins
Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness.
Quote by -Billy Collins
Cummings' career as a writer - and a painter - was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten.
Quote by -Billy Collins
The life of Edward Estlin Cummings began with a childhood in Cambridge, Mass., that he described as happy, but he struggled in both his artistic and romantic exploits against the piousness of his father, an esteemed Harvard professor.
Quote by -Billy Collins
The whole world of publishing is moving to electronic, but when you put a poem on a screen and you increase the type size, the shape of a poem changes.
Quote by -Billy Collins
I'm going through life's cycles at an alarmingly fast pace, but my persona has a Peter Pan quality: he doesn't age.
Quote by -Billy Collins
It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.
Quote by -Billy Collins
Besides the aesthetics, besides teaching an appreciation of T.S. Eliot, a basic need is fulfilled when you teach English at CUNY.
Quote by -Billy Collins
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I virtually had it all to myself, including the language that was spoken there, which was a French Creole, and a landscape that is not recorded, really, and the people.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
My delight in things is definitely Caribbean. It has to do with landscape and food. The fact that my language may have a metrical direction is because that's the shape of the language. I didn't make that shape.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
The older I get, the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been thirty-one. Then there was my twin brother and my sister. We had two aunts as well, my father's sisters. But the immediate family consisted of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
I'm from the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean in the Lesser Antilles, the lower part of the archipelago, which is a bilingual island - French, Creole, and English - but my education is in English.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets' Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English poetry. The most compelling aspect of his work was his intimacy with nature.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
Quote by -Derek Walcott