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Billy Collins Quotes: 7

  • There's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can't pretend to be funny.

  • Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

  • But some nights, I must tell you,I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.I sing a love song as well as I can,lost for a while in the home of the rain.

    Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
  • 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

    Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
  • I could feel the day offering itself to me,and I wanted nothing morethan to be in the moment-but which moment?Not that one, or that one, or that one,

    The Trouble With Poetry - And Other Poems
  • It is 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 sea of unremarkable men and women, anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabetized things, a million forgotten hours.

    Picnic, Lightning
  • all they want to dois tie the poem to a chair with ropeand torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hoseto find out what it really means.

    The Apple That Astonished Paris