"I have three stepfamilies as well as my family of origin. I've had to adjust to them and also go back and forth among them. I became an observer of human nature because when you are in those situations you have to be."

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As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing - and I think that this is important for all writers - I'm trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I'll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.

— Billy Collins