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Billy Collins

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I find it impossible to think of "favorite" poets. I would rather list the ones I cannot stand.

 
Billy Collins

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How would your life be different if … You renamed your "To-Do" list to your "Opportunities" list? Let today be the day … You look at each day as a treasure chest filled with limitless opportunities and take joy in checking many off your list.

 
Steve Maraboli
 

I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time. Wordsworth was sort of right when he said, "Poets in their youth begin in gladness/ But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness." Except that sometimes poets skip the gladness and go straight to the despondency. Why is that? Part of it is the conditions under which poets work — giving all, receiving little in return from an age that by and large ignores them — and part of it is cultural expectation — "The lunatic, the lover and the poet," says Shakespeare, and notice which comes first. My own theory is that poetry is composed with the melancholy side of the brain, and that if you do nothing but, you may find yourself going slowly down a long dark tunnel with no exit. I have avoided this by being ambidextrous: I write novels too. But when I find myself writing poetry again, it always has the surprise of that first unexpected and anonymous gift.

 
Margaret Atwood
 

My favorite song right now is impossible to defend. It's impossible. We should all be ashamed of ourselves for liking this f**king song. Lil Jon. You know that shit: "To the window! To the wall! [crowd sings along] 'Till the sweat drip from my balls! Skeet, skeet, skeet, skeet!" You go to clubs, you see girls dance to that shit. "Till the sweat drip from my balls! Till the sweat drip from my balls! From my balls! From my balls! My balls! Skeet, Skeet Skeet!" I feel sorry for the guys that gotta pick a wife out of this bunch. It's like, "Daddy, where'd you meet Mommy?" "Oh, she was singing about balls at a club. Skeet, skeet, skeet!"

 
Chris Rock
 

"One thing I don’t want to do is write the same CD over and over. Some of my favorite artists have that one or 2 CD’s that just stand out from the rest of their catalog. It’s hard to make a great release when you’re relying on the same bag of tricks all the time."

 
Klayton
 

I asked the headmaster of literature, "Why are there so many headmasters and so few poets? Is it easier for you to train your own kind than ours?" He said, "No. The emperor needs all the headmasters he can get. If a quarter of his people were headmasters he would be perfectly happy. But more than two poets would tear his kingdom apart."

 
Alasdair Gray
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