Thom Gunn Quotes
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I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.
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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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We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
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Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly.
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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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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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Much that is natural, to the will must yield. Men manufacture both machine and soul, And use what they imperfectly control To dare a future from the taken routes.
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Many of my poems are not sexual.
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I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
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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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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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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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We control the content of our dreams.
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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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One is always nearer by not keeping still.
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I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
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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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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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As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.
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A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life.
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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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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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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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Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
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Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one The great grey rigid uniform combined Safety with virtue of the sun. Thus concepts linked like chainmail in the mind.
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I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.
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I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.
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My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation.
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My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
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The painter saw what was, an alternate Candor and secrecy inside the skin.
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