Dylan Thomas

“To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice. Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas. If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work.” ― Dylan Th...”

“In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bre...”

“Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction.”

“When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”

“These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.”

“No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic,...”

“Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances...”

“Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn't do to upset one's own vanity.”

“Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.”

“An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.”

“I've just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record.”

“I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my wor...”

“I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.”

“Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

“Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.”

“Though lovers be lost, love shall not.”

“Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.”

“The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.”

“There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.”

“As I read more and more - and it was not all verse, by any means - my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact,...”