Stephen Spender Quotes

We were obsessed by the feeling that this was the supreme cause of our time. The cause of poets and of writers. The cause of freedom. And that unless the cause of anti-Fascism was won, unless Fascism was defeated, we would be unable to exist as writers.

But reading is not idleness…it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental.

People sometimes divide others into those you laugh at and those you laugh with. The young Auden was someone you could laugh-at-with.

My brothers and sister and I were brought up in an atmosphere which I would describe as ‘Puritan decadence’. Puritanism names the behaviour which is condemned; Puritan decadence regards the name itself as indecent, and pretends that the object behind that name does not exist until it is named.

Poetry cannot take sides except with life.

The poet shares with other artists the faculty of seeing things as though for the first time.