All W. H. Auden Quotes
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
W. H. Auden
61% of people like this quote
"Healing," Papa would tell me, "is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature."
W. H. Auden
59% of people like this 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
59% of people like this 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
57% of people like this quote
Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.
W. H. Auden
57% of people like this quote
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
W. H. Auden
57% of people like this 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.
W. H. Auden
57% of people like this 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
56% of people like this quote
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
W. H. Auden
56% of people like this quote
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden
55% of people like this quote
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. Auden
55% of people like this quote
Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
W. H. Auden
55% of people like this quote
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