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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

We control the content of our dreams.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

With my creative writing students, I've taught literature more than I've taught writing courses'I just hope to make them better.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

You know I know you know I know you know.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

Many of my poems are not sexual.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- Thom Gunn Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes