Thom Gunn Quotes

A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.

Much that is natural, to the will must yield. Men manufacture both machine and soul, And use what they imperfectly control To dare a future from the taken routes.

I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.

How sociable the garden was. We ate and talked in given light. The children put their toys to grass All the warm wakeful August night.

We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.

We control the content of our dreams.

As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.

One is always nearer by not keeping still.

Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly.

I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.

One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.

We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.

Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one The great grey rigid uniform combined Safety with virtue of the sun. Thus concepts linked like chainmail in the mind.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about.

My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

I'm not sure I had ever written a fan letter before to a poet I had not met, but that's what I did when I read two poems by Gregory Woods ... I admired them especially for their technical virtuosity, in that it was technique completely used, never for the sake of cleverness but as a component of feeling ... What an enviable talent Gregory Woods has

The painter saw what was, an alternate Candor and secrecy inside the skin.