Quotes By W. H. Auden

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.

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

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

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

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

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.

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

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

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

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

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

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

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.

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.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

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.

You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.