Thom Gunn famous 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.
-- Thom Gunn

#Way #Influence #Feels

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

#Skins #Saws #Secrecy

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.
-- Thom Gunn

#Taken #Men #Yield

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 reader.
-- Thom Gunn

#Writing #Gay #Interesting

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

#Home #Self #Tests

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

#Thinking #Men #Enjoy

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

#Years #Four

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

#Sex #Thinking #Self

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

#Sex #Book #Passion

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

#Writing #People #Bars

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 each other.
-- Thom Gunn

#Writing #Thinking #Class

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

#Moving #World #Movement

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
-- Thom Gunn

#Two #Feelings #Fans

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

#Confused #Aids #Annihilation

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
-- Thom Gunn

#Paul Sartre

It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
-- Thom Gunn

#Teacher #Gay #Proud

Many of my poems are not sexual.
-- 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

#Safety #Mind #Ignorant

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

#Holy #Grass #Direct

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

#Reading #Factions

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

#Teacher #Definitions #Poetry Is

One is always nearer by not keeping still,
-- Thom Gunn

#Stills

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

#Teacher #Teaching #Pride

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

#Trying #Want #Corny

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.
-- Thom Gunn

#Summer #Children #Night

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

#Feelings #Would Be #Way

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

#Art #Thinking #Looks

We control the content of our dreams.
-- Thom Gunn

#Dream

As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.
-- Thom Gunn

#Hands #Avalanches #Enough

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

#Wonderful #Ginsberg

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

#Cutting #Age #Dying

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

#Rhyming #Way #Meter

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 poetry is sexual, even pornographic.
-- Thom Gunn

#Book #Reading #Thinking

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

#Book #Generations #Wordsworth

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

#Reading #San Francisco #Bishops

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

#War #Two #Vietnam