Quote: 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. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: Healing, Papa would tell me, is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: 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. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: 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. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: Criticism should be a casual conversation. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that faith is even more difficult for Him than it is for us? [Wystan Auden]
Quote: America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an lite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment. [Wystan 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. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility -- the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: We must love one another or die. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbor because our natural attitude toward the other is one of either indifference or hostility. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime. [Wystan Auden]
Quote: It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful. [Wystan 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. [Wystan Auden]