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» Quotes by W. H. Auden »
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmet...
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love ...
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something t...
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is im...
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is ...
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as for...
America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, ...
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, b...
Art is born of humiliation.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should ...
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in dire...
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to...
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at...
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the ...
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say: Sanctity ...
I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the ...
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding l...
In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is...
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: ...
It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of t...
It is... axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more...
It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal ...
It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money...
It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a dr...
Learn from your dreams what you lack.
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotio...
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to h...
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profess...
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that so...
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they a...
Music
No good opera plot can be sensible:... people do not sing when they ar...
No hero is mortal till he dies.
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human act...
Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like s...
Now is the age of anxiety.
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is i...
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatie...
Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape...
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembere...
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, ...
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of...
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not fa...
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the un...
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to re...
To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he...
To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of...
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny aftern...
We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here fo...
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which...
Art
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate wh...
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby ...
Science
You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.
You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in Engl...
You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the di...
You owe it to us all to get on with what you're good at.
Your cameraman might enjoy himself because my face looks like a weddin...