W. H. Auden

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

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.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Art is born of humiliation.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

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.

'Healing, ' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

Now is the age of anxiety.