W. H. Auden

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

No hero is mortal till he dies.

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

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.

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.

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.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

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

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

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

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

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

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

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

Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

It is 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.

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

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

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.

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

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

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

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

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.

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.

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

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.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

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

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

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

Now is the age of anxiety.

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

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

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.

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

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

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

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

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