Top 27 Quotes by Thom Gunn

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.

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.

As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.

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 don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.

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

We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

We control the content of our dreams.

When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.