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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.

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
Fact
Culture
Facts
Art
Practicing
Money
Earn
Writing
Poet
Much
Poetry
Talking

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My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer' 'I'm sorry, not yet.
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A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
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What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?
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Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
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All pity is self-pity.
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Composing mortals with immortal fire.
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Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.
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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
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The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.
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Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
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Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.
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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.
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To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.
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We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
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Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
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The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have Not universal love But to be loved alone.
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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.
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Does God judge us by appearances? I Suspect that He does.
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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.
W. H. Auden