Billy Collins Funny Quotations

Discovering Samuel Beckett in college was a big deal for me. I realized you could be very funny and very dark at the same time.

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.

When I write, I'm not trying to be funny. It's the way I look at the world.

I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.