Top 27 Quotes by Thom Gunn

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.

We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.

I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.

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.

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

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.