Quotes from W. H. Auden

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.

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

Any marriage happy or unhappy is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance however passionate.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.

It is nonsense to speak of 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. To a hungry man it is, rightly, more important that he eat than that he philosophize.

Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.

Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

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

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.

It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."

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

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

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.

Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

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.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.

Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.

It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.

When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.