Quotes By W. H. Auden
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
W. H. Auden
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
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. Auden
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
W. H. Auden
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
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
W. H. Auden
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
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.
W. H. Auden
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
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
W. H. Auden
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
W. H. Auden
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
W. H. Auden
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
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
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.
W. H. Auden
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