"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."
-W. H. Auden
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"Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest."
-W. H. Auden
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"Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods."
-W. H. Auden
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"Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another."
-W. H. Auden
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"Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh."
-W. H. Auden
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"Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be."
-W. H. Auden
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"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."
-C. S. Lewis
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"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television."
-Woody Allen
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"I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art."
-Ernst Fischer
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"Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know."
-Groucho Marx
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"I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot."
-Steve Martin
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"An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have."
-Andy Warhol
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