W. H. Auden

“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”

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

“A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.”

“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.”

“I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.”

“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.”

“Learn from your dreams what you lack.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Art is born of humiliation.”

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

“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.”

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

“Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.”

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

“Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”

“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.”

“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.”