Art & Creativity Quote by Thom Gunn

Gunn makes perception sound less like a passive camera and more like a habit of curatorship: we don’t just see, we sort, frame, and keep. The sly power of “private art gallery” is that it flatters and indicts at once. It suggests refinement - a mind with taste - while admitting how selective, even self-serving, memory can be. A gallery isn’t a warehouse; it’s an edited display. What gets “treasured” isn’t the world as it happened, but the version that survives our preferences, our needs, our damage.

The line also carries Gunn’s characteristic coolness about intimacy. The gallery is “private,” which implies solitude and control. You can revisit the same internal canvases without negotiating with anyone else’s account. That has a consoling function (inner life as refuge), but it also hints at emotional quarantine: experience sealed behind glass, protected from contradiction, protected from change.

Context matters: Gunn’s work often sits at the intersection of sharp observation and the body’s unruly facts - desire, risk, urban encounter, later the AIDS crisis and the pressures of caretaking and grief. In that world, to “treasure” what you’ve seen is not merely aesthetic; it’s an ethics of attention under threat. The mind becomes a museum against erasure.

The sentence’s plain diction is part of the trick. It reads like common sense, then quietly reveals a theory of consciousness: reflection is already art-making, and every person is an amateur curator of the self. The subtext is bracing: your identity is, in part, whatever you’ve chosen to hang on the wall.