A Quote by Billy Collins

When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe. — © Billy Collins
When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.
When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
The Olympics is not really about the sport, it's about the story behind the person. You keep the sport relatively simple to understand - let the fans understand that a takedown is 1 point, a turn is 2, a pin and the match is over. Keep it simple, and keep the story on the individual.
I think more to the point, these pivotal times means something other than a politician. I understand the economy. I understand the world. I have a lot of foreign policy experience. I understand bureaucracies. I understand technology, and I understand leadership.
Sometimes you can defuse a difficult situation simply by being willing to understand the other person. Often all that people need is to know that someone else cares about how they feel and it attempting to understand their position.
The ability of nonintelligent people to understand the most complicated mechanisms and to use them has always been to me a cause of astonishment: their inability to understand simple questions is even more astonishing. The general acceptance of simple ideas is difficult and rare, and yet it is only when simple, fundamental, ideas have been accepted that further progress becomes possible on a higher level.
How can I make him understand that he did not create me? He makes the same mistake as the others when they look at a feeble-minded person and laugh because they don't understand there are human feelings involved.
Pursuing music eats into your life to the point where there is no space left for anything else. You are lucky if you find a partner who is able to understand that, but even then, they will only understand it for a while, and then things get - you know, difficult.
In the early 21st century, it is easy to condemn the Bond books for being racist and imperialist, sexist and misogynist, elitist and sadistic. But this is merely another way of saying that we cannot understand the Bond books without reference to the personality, the outlook and the 'Tory imagination' of the man who wrote them, and to the time in which he wrote them; and that we cannot understand the 1950s and 1960s without some reference to them, and to him.
If my little girl wants a toy or something, sometimes I say, 'I don't have the money'. It's quite difficult to understand why I'm saying that, but she needs to understand that nothing comes easy.
I kind of like the three-point shoot-out. It's very easy to understand, very simple.
Most of us do not understand nuclear fission, but we accept it. I don't understand television, but I accept it. I don't understand radio, but every week my voice goes out around the world, and I accept it. Why is it so easy to accept all these man-made miracles and so difficult to accept the miracles of the Bible?
Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.
I write from a people's point of view. I love people because I understand them. I understand an enemy, I understand a friend, I understand grey areas, and I understand black areas.
One can quite understand vegetarianism. One can quite understand meat-eating. But it is difficult to understand why a person who is a flesh-eater should object to one kind of flesh, namely cow's flesh. This is an anomaly which call for explanation.
Arriving at a simple piece of music is a very difficult balance because, in being simple, you could easily be banal, so maybe it's more difficult to write a simple piece of music than a 12-tone piece where no one understands exactly what it is about.
I don't understand why anyone would collect my work. Please understand... it's like writing Our House. It took me an hour, it was 30 years ago, get over it! But people say, No, no, it changed my life, and I don't understand that. I can't take that seriously as a producer of what I consider to be art. If they want to collect it, fantastic. If you see what I saw when I took it and it means something to you, then by all means collect it. If I make some money, um, fine.
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