A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
- W. H. Auden Quote

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
- W. H. Auden Quote

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
- W. H. Auden Quote

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.
- W. H. Auden Quote

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
- W. H. Auden Quote

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
- W. H. Auden Quote

All that we are not stares back at what we are.
- W. H. Auden Quote

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.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Art is born of humiliation.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
- W. H. Auden Quote

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
- W. H. Auden Quote

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
- W. H. Auden Quote

''Healing,'' Papa would tell me, ''is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.''
- W. H. Auden Quote

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
- W. H. Auden Quote

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.
- W. H. Auden Quote

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
- W. H. Auden Quote

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
- W. H. Auden Quote

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
- W. H. Auden Quote

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

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.
- W. H. Auden Quote

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
- W. H. Auden Quote

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.
- W. H. Auden Quote

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

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.
- W. H. Auden Quote

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.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Learn from your dreams what you lack.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
- W. H. Auden Quote

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
- W. H. Auden Quote

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
- W. H. Auden Quote

No hero is immortal till he dies.
- W. H. Auden Quote

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Now is the age of anxiety.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
- W. H. Auden Quote

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
- W. H. Auden Quote

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
- W. H. Auden Quote

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.
- W. H. Auden Quote

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.
- W. H. Auden Quote

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
- W. H. Auden Quote

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
- W. H. Auden Quote

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
- W. H. Auden Quote

We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.
- W. H. Auden Quote

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.
- W. H. Auden Quote

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.
- W. H. Auden Quote

You owe it to us all to get on with what you're good at.
- W. H. Auden Quote