Quotes by Auden, W. H.

"I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a suspension of belief. A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true."

Auden, W. H. on poetry and poets   

"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."

Auden, W. H. on poetry and poets
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"Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying."

Auden, W. H. on poetry and poets   

"Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest."

Auden, W. H. on poetry and poets   

"As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence."

Auden, W. H. on poetry and poets   

"The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice."

Auden, W. H. on politics
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"My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth."

Auden, W. H. on politics
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"Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self."

Auden, W. H. on autobiography   

"There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, Did you get an erection? If the answer is Yes from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic."

Auden, W. H. on pornography   

"To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention -- on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God -- that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer."

Auden, W. H. on prayer   

"You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire."

Auden, W. H. on relationship   

"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."

Auden, W. H. on science   

"You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people."

Auden, W. H. on secrets   

"It is... axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction."

Auden, W. H. on sensitivity
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"We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know."

Auden, W. H. on service
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"You have to see the sex act comically, as a child."

Auden, W. H. on sex
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"All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation."

Auden, W. H. on sin   

"Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style."

Auden, W. H. on slavery   

"A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless."

Auden, W. H. on smells   

"Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so."

Auden, W. H. on song and singing   

"Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public."

Auden, W. H. on behavior   

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

Auden, W. H. on books - reading
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"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered."

Auden, W. H. on books - reading
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"Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden assassin waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire; it as if there had to be some outlet for their foiled creative fire."

Auden, W. H. on cancer   

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

Auden, W. H. on children   

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

Auden, W. H. on talent
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"A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep."

Auden, W. H. on teacher
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"Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake."

Auden, W. H. on theater   

"Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are shaggy dog stories; they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it."

Auden, W. H. on theology   

"Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape."

Auden, W. H. on upbringing   

"In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it --not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of others for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it."

Auden, W. H. on work   

"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."

Auden, W. H. on work   

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

Auden, W. H. on writers and writing
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"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."

Auden, W. H. on writers and writing
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"Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good."

Auden, W. H. on funerals
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"Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading."

Auden, W. H. on conceit
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"Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books."

Auden, W. H. on confession   

"Healing, Papa would tell me, is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature."

Auden, W. H. on convalescence   

"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."

Auden, W. H. on creativity   

"The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid."

Auden, W. H. on criticism