A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori.'

— Billy Collins

All they want to does tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

— Billy Collins

A long time ago when cataclysms were Commons sneezes and land masses slid around the globe looking for places to settle down and become continents, someone introduced us at a party.

— Billy Collins

And you are certainly not the pine-scented air. There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air

— Billy Collins

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.

— 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.

— Billy Collins

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.

— Billy Collins

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Montano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

— Billy Collins

I could feel the day offering itself to me, and I wanted nothing more than to be in the moment-but which moment? Not that one, or that one, or that one,

— Billy Collins

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

— Billy Collins