Thom Gunn Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

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

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

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

“I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.”

“I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.”

“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.”

“When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.”

“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 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.”