Top 27 Quotes by Thom Gunn

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

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.

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 haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.

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 notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader.

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.

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

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

Many of my poems are not sexual.