Philip Larkin Quotes

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.

I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action

I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.

As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.

What will survive of us is love.

Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP

I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn't matter if you've done anything or not.

Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.

One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.

It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about (That is, when you are young).

Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance.

Selflessness is like waiting in a hospital In a badly-fitting suit on a cold wet morning. Selfishness is like listening to good jazz With drinks for further orders and a huge fire.

When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.

A good poem about failure is a success.

So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.

I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.

Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone finality They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.

Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.

This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

I wonder love can have already set In dreams, when we've not met More times than I can number on one hand.

In everyone there sleeps. A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make. By loving others, but across most it sweeps. As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures.

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.

I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any - after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.

I like spaghetti because you don't have to take your eyes off the book to pick about among it, it's all the same.

What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. Theyare to be happy in: Where can we live but days?

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back

Here is an unfenced existance

Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.

My mother, who hates thunderstorms, Holds up each summer day and shakes It out suspiciously, lest swarms Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there.

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

I didn't choose poetry: poetry chose me.

We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.

I have wished you something None of the others would.

Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.

Give me a thrill, says the reader, Give me a kick; I don't care how you succeed, or What subject you pick.