Quotes By 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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