A biography for W. H. Audenhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
“Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.”
“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.”
“Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.”
“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.”
“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”
“All that we are not stares back at what we are.”
“We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.”
“All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.”
“The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.”
“Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.”
“Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.”
“God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.”
“The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”
“It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'”