Dylan Thomas

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

As I read more and more - and it was not all verse, by any means - my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction.

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.

No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud's own writing.

But time has set its maggot on their track.

Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.

The function of posterity is to look after itself.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn't do to upset one's own vanity.

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

I've just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record.

An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.

When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.

Though lovers be lost, love shall not.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.