Thom Gunn Quotes, Sayings, Remarks, Thoughts and Speeches
Thom Gunn Quotes and Sayings
- 1
As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.
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- 2
Being in the closet, I saw being homosexual as a deliberate choice. It's got nothing to do with choice or the will, but I was being defiant about it.
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- 3
Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
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- 4
Donald Davie was someone whom I got to know shortly before his death. He was consistently supportive, very kind to me, but he was very against queers.
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- 5
Edmund White said he thought coming out in public was good for any writer's work. It was for mine, because the subject matter is so much greater.
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- 6
Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
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- 7
I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.
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- 8
I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about.
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- 9
I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.
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- 10
I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
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- 11
I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.
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- 12
I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.
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- 13
I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.
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- 14
I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader.
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- 15
I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.
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- 16
I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.
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- 17
I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.
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- 18
I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
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- 19
I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.
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- 20
I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
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- 21
It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
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- 22
Many of my poems are not sexual.
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- 23
My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
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- 24
There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
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- 25
We control the content of our dreams.
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- 26
We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.
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- 27
We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
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- 28
When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.
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- 29
When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.
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- 30
When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.
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- 31
While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.
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- 32
With my creative writing students, I've taught literature more than I've taught writing courses'I just hope to make them better.
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