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One is always nearer by not keeping still.
Thom Gunn
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Thom Gunn
Age: 74 †
Born: 1929
Born: August 29
Died: 2004
Died: April 24
Poet
Writer
Gravesend
Kent
Thomson William Gunn
William Guinneach Gunn
Stills
Still
Always
Nearer
Keeping
More quotes by Thom Gunn
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
Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
Thom Gunn
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
My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
Thom Gunn
Many of my poems are not sexual.
Thom Gunn
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.
Thom Gunn
The painter saw what was, an alternate Candor and secrecy inside the skin.
Thom Gunn
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
I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Thom Gunn
How sociable the garden was. We ate and talked in given light. The children put their toys to grass All the warm wakeful August night.
Thom Gunn
I'm not sure I had ever written a fan letter before to a poet I had not met, but that's what I did when I read two poems by Gregory Woods ... I admired them especially for their technical virtuosity, in that it was technique completely used, never for the sake of cleverness but as a component of feeling ... What an enviable talent Gregory Woods has
Thom Gunn
Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
Thom Gunn
A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life.
Thom Gunn
Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly.
Thom Gunn
Much that is natural, to the will must yield. Men manufacture both machine and soul, And use what they imperfectly control To dare a future from the taken routes.
Thom Gunn
I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.
Thom Gunn
I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
Thom Gunn
I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
Thom Gunn
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
I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.
Thom Gunn