58 Quotes by Thom Gunn

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

Your dying was a difficult enterprise.First, petty things took up your energies,The small but clustering duties of the sick, Irritant as the cough’s dry rhetoric.Those hours of waiting for pills, shot, X-ray Or test (while you read novels two a day) Already with a kind of clumsy stealthDistanced you from the habits of your health.

Outdoors next day, I was dizzy from a sense Of being ejected with some violenceFrom vigil in a white and distant spot Where I was numb, into this garden plotToo warm, too close, and not enough like pain.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.