Top 27 Quotes by 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.

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.

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

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

We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

We control the content of our dreams.

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.