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

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
Thom Gunn

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
Thom Gunn

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.
Thom Gunn

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.
Thom Gunn

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.
Thom Gunn

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

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

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.
Thom Gunn

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


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.
Thom Gunn

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

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.
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.
Thom Gunn

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Thom Gunn

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.
Thom Gunn

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
Thom Gunn

It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
Thom Gunn

Many of my poems are not sexual.
Thom Gunn

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