Thom Gunn - Best 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!

Hot Quotes

My first love is art and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

In my world history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought who won them and who lost them – unless there is a painting a play a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece.

Wushu is a move in Chinese a physical move. An attack. Wushu is like an art.

Rock isn't art it's the way ordinary people talk.

Tell me thy company and I'll tell thee what thou art.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art like album-cover design without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down.

I was very much into buying contemporary art but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art but all of a sudden my mood has changed and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.

I did this Super-8 film at art school called 'Tissues' this black comedy about a family whose father has been arrested for child molestation. I was absolutely thrilled by every inch of it and would throw my projector in the back of my car and show it to anybody who would watch it.

The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.

Author: Thom Gunn

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!

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

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.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

We control the content of our dreams.