Dylan Thomas quotes, comments and one-liners

• A born writer is born scrofulous; his career is an accident dictated by physical or circumstantial disabilities.
  
  
• A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
  
  
• After thirty nine years this is all I've done.
  
  
• Ambition is critical.
  
  
• An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.
  
  
• And death shall have no dominion.
  
  
• And on seesaw Sunday nights, I'd woo who ever I would with my wicked eye!
  
  
• But time has set its maggot on their track.
  
  
• Do not go gentle into that good night.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• Dylan talked copiously, then stopped. 'Somebody's boring me,' he said, 'I think it's me.'
  
  
• Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need to read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.
  
  
• Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.
  
  
• He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.
  
  
• I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• I've just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record.
  
  
• My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.
  
  
• Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.
  
  
• Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  
  
• The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Drives my green age that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer.
  
  
• The function of posterity is to look after itself.
  
  
• There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• Though lovers be lost love shall not.
  
  
• To begin at the beginning. (Under Milk Wood)
  
  
• Ugly, lovely town (on his Swansea birthplace)
  
  
• Wales is the land of my fathers. And my fathers can have it.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.