Thom Gunn quotes

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. (Thom Gunn)

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

Thom Gunn

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.

Thom Gunn

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

Thom Gunn

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

Thom Gunn

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.

Thom Gunn

Many of my poems are not sexual.

Thom Gunn

We control the content of our dreams.

Thom Gunn

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

Thom Gunn

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

Thom Gunn

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. (Thom Gunn)

I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.

Thom Gunn

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.

Thom Gunn

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

Thom Gunn

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

Thom Gunn

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 my fellow teachers knew.

Thom Gunn

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.

Thom Gunn

I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.

Thom Gunn

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 benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.

Thom Gunn

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Thom Gunn

We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading. (Thom Gunn)

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.

Thom Gunn

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

Thom Gunn

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.

Thom Gunn

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

Thom Gunn

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Thom Gunn

Occupation: British Poet
Born: August 29, 1929
Died: April 25, 2004
Quotes count: 35
Wikipedia: Thom Gunn

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