Thom Gunn quotes
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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 -
“The painter saw what was, an alternate Candor and secrecy inside the skin.”
-- Thom Gunn -
“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 GunnSource : Thom Gunn (2010). “The Sense of Movement”, p.6, Faber & Faber
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“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 -
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“I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.”
-- Thom Gunn -
“I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.”
-- Thom Gunn -
“I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.”
-- Thom Gunn -
“I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.”
-- Thom Gunn -
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“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 -
“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 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 -
“One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.”
-- Thom GunnSource : Thom Gunn (2010). “The Sense of Movement”, p.6, Faber & Faber
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“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 -
“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 GunnSource : "In Time Of Plague". Poem by Thom Gunn, www.theguardian.com. 1992.
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“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 -
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“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 GunnSource : Thom Gunn (2017). “Selected Poems of Thom Gunn”, p.57, Faber & Faber
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“Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly.”
-- Thom GunnSource : Thom Gunn (2017). “Selected Poems of Thom Gunn”, p.89, Faber & Faber
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“We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.”
-- Thom Gunn -
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“My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.”
-- 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 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 -
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“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 GunnSource : Thom Gunn (2017). “Selected Poems of Thom Gunn”, p.103, Faber & Faber
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“Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.”
-- 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 -
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“As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.”
-- Thom GunnSource : Thom Gunn (1987). “Night Sweats”, Robert L Barth
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“Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.”
-- Thom Gunn -
“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 -
“I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.”
-- Thom Gunn -
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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