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Quote by Billy Collins

“It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.”

Quote by Billy Collins

Author

Billy Collins is a renowned American poet, born on March 22, 1941. His poetry is known for its simplicity, humor, and profound insights, making it popular among readers. Collins served as the United States Poet Laureate and taught at several universities. more

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“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 right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can't afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.”

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“One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.”

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“Poetry is my cheap means of transportation, by the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.”

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“Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its 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.”

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“I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.”

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“It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.”

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“Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art.”

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