Thom Gunn Quotes

33 quotes in 467 categories

• Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
• As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.
• We control the content of our dreams.
• 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…
• Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
• I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with…
• 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…
• 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…
• I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.
• I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.
• I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.
• I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
• I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the…
• 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…
• I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
• 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…
• I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his…
• I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the…
• 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…
• When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of…

Browse Thom Gunn Quotes by Category