Quotes By W. H. Auden

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

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

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

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.

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

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

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

May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that "faith" is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

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.

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.