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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 is bored by repetition.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
Composer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Hands
Lazy
Craves
Unexpected
Sloth
Bored
Impatient
Familiar
Crave
Ears
Laziness
Novel
Repetition
Hand
Shocked
Eye
Tends

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To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal.
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We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
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O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed.
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Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
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To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith
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If there are any souls in hell, it is because that is where they insist on being.
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Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
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Learn from your dreams what you lack.
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An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
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Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
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Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.
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Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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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.
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In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
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A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
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Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.
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