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Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
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Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer writer for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer poetry would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
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A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
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Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
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A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
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Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, Dance, Dance 'till you drop.
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Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
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Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say
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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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There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, ''Did you get an erection?'' If the answer is ''Yes'' from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.
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I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade
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It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.
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To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.
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The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
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Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.
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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.
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Love each other or perish.
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Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred without Science, we should always worship false gods.
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