Thom Gunn Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“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

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