Top 27 Quotes by Thom Gunn

When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.

While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.

I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about.

I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

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.

I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.

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.

I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.

I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.