"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."

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More quotes from: W. H. Auden

• "A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, ..."
• "A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects. "
• "A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. "
• "A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep. "
• "A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. "
• "A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. ..."
• "A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it ..."
• "All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation. "
• "Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual ..."
• "America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, ..."
• "Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among ..."
• "Art is born of humiliation. "
• "Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. "
• "Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences ..."
• "Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality. "
• "Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to ..."
• "Composing mortals with immortal fire. "
• "Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic. "
• "Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own ..."
• "Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud. "
• "For who can bear to feel himself forgotten? "
• "Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as ..."
• "God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich. "
• "Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say: Sanctity is the state ..."

• "I don't get acting jobs because of my looks. "
• "I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river ..."
• "If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons ..."
• "In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of ..."
• "In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be ..."
• "It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, ..."
• "It is... axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than ..."
• "It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to ..."
• "It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too ..."
• "Learn from your dreams what you lack. "
• "Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of ..."
• "May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God ..."
• "Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession. "
• "Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has ..."
• "Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell. "
• "Music is the best means we have of digesting time. "
• "My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain. "
• "No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are ..."
• "No good opera plot can be sensible:... people do not sing when they are feeling ..."
• "No hero is mortal till he dies. "
• "No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called ..."
• "Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden ..."
• "Now is the age of anxiety. "

• "One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell. "
• "Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out ..."
• "Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into ..."
• "Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. "
• "Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they ..."
• "The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind. "
• "The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, ..."
• "The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have ..."
• "The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; ..."
• "The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living. "
• "There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, ..."
• "To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he ..."
• "To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life, the ..."
• "We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons. "
• "We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here ..."
• "What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to ..."
• "When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who ..."
• "When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate ..."
• "You have to see the sex act comically, as a child. "
• "You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people ..."
• "You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference ..."
• "You owe it to us all to get on with what you're good at. "
• "Your cameraman might enjoy himself because my face looks like a wedding-cake left out in ..."