Thom Gunn Quotes

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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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 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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We control the content of our dreams.

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I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.

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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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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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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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Many of my poems are not sexual.

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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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Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

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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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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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We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.

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My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

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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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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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I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.

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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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You know I know you know I know you know.

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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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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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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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I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.

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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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