Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. Auden

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
W. H. Auden

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
W. H. Auden

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
W. H. Auden

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
W. H. Auden

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
W. H. Auden

"Healing," Papa would tell me, "is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature."
W. H. Auden

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
W. H. Auden

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
W. H. Auden

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
W. H. Auden

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
W. H. Auden

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
W. H. Auden

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
W. H. Auden

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
W. H. Auden

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.
W. H. Auden

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
W. H. Auden

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
W. H. Auden

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
W. H. Auden

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
W. H. Auden

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
W. H. Auden