Thom Gunn Quotes

Quotes about:

• A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life.

  Thom Gunn

  Way, Influence, Feels

  46 Copy quote

• Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

  Thom Gunn

  Feelings, Would Be, Way

  8 Copy quote

• I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.

  Thom Gunn

  Home, Self, Tests

  9 Copy quote

• I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

  Thom Gunn

  Trying, Want, Corny

  8 Copy quote

• My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

  Thom Gunn

  Teacher, Definitions, Poetry Is

  4 Copy quote

• As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.

  Thom Gunn

  Art, Thinking, Looks

  9 Copy quote

• Much that is natural, to the will must yield.
  Men manufacture both machine and soul,
  And use what they imperfectly control
  To dare a future from the taken routes.

  Thom Gunn

  Taken, Men, Yield

  Thom Gunn (2010). “The Sense of Movement”, p.6, Faber & Faber

  7 Copy quote

• How sociable the garden was.
  We ate and talked in given light.
  The children put their toys to grass
  All the warm wakeful August night.

  Thom Gunn

  Summer, Children, Night

  Thom Gunn (2017). “Selected Poems of Thom Gunn”, p.103, Faber & Faber

  7 Copy quote

• I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.

  Thom Gunn

  Cutting, Dying, Age

  7 Copy quote

• We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.

  Thom Gunn

  Reading, Factions

  7 Copy quote

• We control the content of our dreams.

  Thom Gunn

  Dream, Our Dreams

  4 Copy quote

• As if hands were enough
  To hold an avalanche off.

  Thom Gunn

  Hands, Avalanches, Enough

  Thom Gunn (1987). “Night Sweats”, Robert L Barth

  8 Copy quote

• One is always nearer by not keeping still.

  Thom Gunn

  Stills

  1957 'On the Move'.

  4 Copy quote

• Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly.

  Thom Gunn

  Holy, Grass, Flicker

  Thom Gunn (2017). “Selected Poems of Thom Gunn”, p.89, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

• I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.

  Thom Gunn

  Sex, Book, Passion

  4 Copy quote

• One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.

  Thom Gunn

  Moving, Movement, World

  Thom Gunn (2010). “The Sense of Movement”, p.6, Faber & Faber

  6 Copy quote

• We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

  Thom Gunn

  Book, Generations, Wordsworth

  7 Copy quote

• I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.

  Thom Gunn

  Men, Thinking, Enjoy

  4 Copy quote

• Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one The great grey rigid uniform combined Safety with virtue of the sun. Thus concepts linked like chainmail in the mind.

  Thom Gunn

  Safety, Ignorant, Mind

  Thom Gunn (2017). “Selected Poems of Thom Gunn”, p.57, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

• There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

  Thom Gunn

  War, Two, Hiv

  7 Copy quote

• I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about.

  Thom Gunn

  Writing, People, Bars

  8 Copy quote

• My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation.

  Thom Gunn

  Confused, Aids, Annihilation

  "In Time Of Plague". Poem by Thom Gunn, www.theguardian.com. 1992.

  8 Copy quote

• I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

  Thom Gunn

  Rhyming, Way, Meter

  7 Copy quote

• I'm not sure I had ever written a fan letter before to a poet I had not met, but that's what I did when I read two poems by Gregory Woods ... I admired them especially for their technical virtuosity, in that it was technique completely used, never for the sake of cleverness but as a component of feeling ... What an enviable talent Gregory Woods has

  Thom Gunn

  Two, Feelings, Technique

  4 Copy quote

• The painter saw what was, an alternate
  Candor and secrecy inside the skin.

  Thom Gunn

  Skins, Saws, Secrecy

  7 Copy quote

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