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QUOTE: 'The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: [...]

QUOTE: 'The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become [...]

QUOTE: 'Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may [...]

QUOTE: 'How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a [...]

QUOTE: 'Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any [...]

QUOTE: 'A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: [...]

QUOTE: 'We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although [...]

QUOTE: 'We must love one another or die.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: [...]

QUOTE: 'If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to [...]

QUOTE: 'The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and [...]

QUOTE: 'You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.' --Auden, W. H. [...]

QUOTE: 'When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.' --Auden, W. H. [...]

QUOTE: 'What people don't realize is that intimacy has its conventions as well as ordinary social intercourse. There are three cardinal rules -- don't take somebody else's boyfriend unless you've [...]

QUOTE: 'To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.' --Auden, W. [...]

QUOTE: 'Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: [...]

QUOTE: 'May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race [...]

QUOTE: 'My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: [...]

QUOTE: 'Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men and women who look [...]

QUOTE: 'The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and [...]

QUOTE: 'America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an ?lite which knows the [...]

QUOTE: 'Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: Books - [...]

QUOTE: 'A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: Books - [...]

QUOTE: 'Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: [...]

QUOTE: 'Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting [...]

QUOTE: 'Eagerly, musician,Sweep your string,So we may sing,Elated, optative,Our several voicesInterblending,Playfully contending,Not interferingBut co-inhering,For all withinThe cincture of the soundIs holy ground,Where all are Brothers,None faceless Others. Let mortals bewareOf [...]

QUOTE: 'The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: Death and [...]

QUOTE: 'Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person [...]

QUOTE: 'A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.' --Auden, W. [...]

QUOTE: 'The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as [...]

QUOTE: 'Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he [...]

QUOTE: 'Criticism should be a casual conversation.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: Critics and [...]

QUOTE: 'All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: [...]

QUOTE: 'All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to [...]

QUOTE: 'You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: [...]

QUOTE: 'We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: [...]

QUOTE: 'It is... axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot [...]

QUOTE: 'Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.' --Auden, W. H. SUBJECT: [...]

QUOTE: 'Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be [...]

QUOTE: 'A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can [...]

QUOTE: 'A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, [...]

QUOTE: 'In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can [...]

QUOTE: 'It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in [...]

QUOTE: 'Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the [...]

QUOTE: 'Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.' --Auden, W. [...]

QUOTE: 'No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly [...]