Thom Gunn 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.

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

As humans we look at things and think about what we`ve looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.

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

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!

We control the content of our dreams.

I don`t know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.

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

Deep feeling doesn`t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

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.

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.

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.

I haven`t written anything in four years. I`m sort of dried up.

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.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

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.

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.

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.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

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.

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.

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.

I don`t think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

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.

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.

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.