58 Quotes by Thom Gunn

It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!

I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.

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

While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.

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

When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.

I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.

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.

I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader.