Quotes by W. Auden

• What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
• Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
• Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
• Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
• Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
• The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
• The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
• The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
• The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
• We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
• When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
• When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
• You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
• You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
• Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
• Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
• To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
• A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
• We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
• A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
• 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 that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
• A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
• All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
• Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
• Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
• A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
• Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
• Art is born of humiliation.
• Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
• Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
• All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
• All that we are not stares back at what we are.
• History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
• Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
• Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
• Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
• Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
• Learn from your dreams what you lack.
• In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.
• I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
• It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
• Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
• Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
• 'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
• Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
• In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
• One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
• In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
• It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
• It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
• For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
• Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
• I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
• If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
• 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 are feeling sensible.
• No hero is mortal till he dies.
• No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
• Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
• Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
• Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
• No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
• The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
• Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
• Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
• Now is the age of anxiety.
• Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
• Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.
• May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that "faith" is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
• God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
• If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.