Quotes By W. H. Auden

You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.

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.

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

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 professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

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.

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

Art is born of humiliation.

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

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

All that we are not stares back at what we are.

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

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.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

Now is the age of anxiety.