W. H. Auden

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Art is born of humiliation.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

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 romance, however passionate.

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

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 so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

Now is the age of anxiety.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.