W. H. Auden Quotes
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No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
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If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.
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I said earlier that I do not believe an artist's life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.
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When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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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.
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'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
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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.
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Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
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When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
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To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however 'good' I may become, remains unchanged.
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It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
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It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, 'What should I write at the age of sixty-four,' but never, 'What should I write in 1940.'
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I am beginning to lose patience With my personal relations. They are not deep And they are not cheap.
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One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
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God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
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The poet who writes 'free' verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
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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.
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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.
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If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
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A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business.
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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.
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Let us honour if we canThe vertical manThough we value noneBut the horizontal one.
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Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.