W. H. Auden's Quotes

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.

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.

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

No hero is mortal till he dies.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

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.

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.

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.

It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

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.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

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.

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.

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.

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.