Quote

Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.

W. H. Auden

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Whose
Crave
Listen
Plain
Books
Cooks
Stills
Subtle
Still
Clever
Plainer
Ever
Cooking
Ornamental
Book
Critics
Provincial
Made
Various
Crude

More quotes by W. H. Auden

Image
Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.
W. H. Auden
Image
the child unlucky in his little State, Some hearth where freedom is excluded, A hive whose honey is fear and worry, Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape
W. H. Auden
Image
What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?
W. H. Auden
Image
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
W. H. Auden
Image
There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.
W. H. Auden
Image
Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one
W. H. Auden
Image
You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
W. H. Auden
Image
It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, What should I write at the age of sixty-four, but never, What should I write in 1940.
W. H. Auden
Image
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
W. H. Auden
Image
I'm always amazed at the American practice of allowing one party to a homosexual act to remain passive--it's so undemocratic. Sexmust be mutual.
W. H. Auden
Image
A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting he must also believe it to be true.
W. H. Auden
Image
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
W. H. Auden
Image
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.
W. H. Auden
Image
To make one, there must be two.
W. H. Auden
Image
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.
W. H. Auden
Image
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. Auden
Image
Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes i do not like my work On a pink official form.
W. H. Auden
Image
I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
W. H. Auden
Image
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another...
W. H. Auden
Image
Art is born of humiliation.
W. H. Auden