Quotes from Dylan Thomas

But time has set its maggot on their track.

This bread I break was once the oat, This wine upon a foreign tree Plunged in its fruit; Man in the day or wind at night Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

Love drips & gathers, but the fallen blood Shall calm her sores..." -Thomas, The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

Hands have not tears to flow.

Somebody's boring me; I think it's me.

The closer I move To death, one man through his sundered hulks, The louder the sun blooms And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults.

These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.

...it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud's own writing.

Why do men think you can pick love up and re-light it like a candle? Women know when love is over.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, danger.

... Rebel against the flesh and bone, The word of the blood, the wily skin, And the maggot no man can slay.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.

I know in London a Welsh hairdresser who has striven so vehemently to abolish his accent that he sounds like a man speaking with the Elgin marbles in his mouth.

Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms, 'Yes, this is it. This is why the poem moves me so...' But you're back again where you began. You've back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

I've just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record.