Philip Larkin quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Philip Larkin on Wise Famous Quotes.

Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off.

Everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly.

Any memory for the most part depending on chance.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

A good meal can somewhat repair / The eatings of slight love

Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments ...

A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.

I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.

books are a load of crap

One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.

You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.

Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.' Philip Larkin

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

Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.

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.'

What will survive of us is love.

But superstition, like belief, must die ...

No one can tear your thread out of himself.
No one can tie you down or set you free.

The difficult part of love
Is being selfish enough ...

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.

If I looked into your face / expecting a word or a laugh on the old conditions, / it would not be a friend who met my eye

Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

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

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

I have wished you something
None of the others would ...

Clearly money has something to do with life ...

Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.

And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.

In times when nothing stood / but worsened, or grew strange / there was one constant good: / she did not change.

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself

Life is slow dying.

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

I'd like to think ... that people in pubs would talk about my poems

Sex means nothing
just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.

Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn ...

Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.

They both rise / Make for the Coke dispenser. 'What's he like? / Christ, I just told you.

Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit,
Whatever they are ...

Ought we to smile / Perhaps make friends? No: in the race for seats / You're best alone. Friendship is not worth while.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Parents fuck you up. They don't mean to but they do.

All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives,

I have started to say
"A quarter of a century"
Or "thirty years back"
About my own life.

The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.

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

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

Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.

Here is unfenced existence

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

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

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.

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

Why can't one stop being a son without becoming a father?

They say eyes clear with age.

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

SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.

Walk with the dead
For fear of death.

To put one brick upon another,
Add a third, and then a fourth,
Leaves no time to wonder whether
What you do has any worth.

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?

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

Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

A very crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself.

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.

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

Joy
Is for the simple or the great to feel,
Neither of which we are.

My age fallen away like white swaddling
Floats in the middle distance, becomes
An inhabited cloud.

Originality is being different from oneself, not others.

In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing.

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

The sight of the money depressed her, because in such small familiar things the foreign country around her was best expressed.

Still, vicious or virtuous,
Love suits most of us.

They mess you up, your Mom and Dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had. And add some extra, just for you

Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow.

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

I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.

Poetry is emotional in nature and theatrical in operation.

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?

I am awakened each dawn
Increasingly to fear ...

Only the young can be alone freely. The time is shorter now for company, And sitting by a lamp more often brings Not peace, but other things.

To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted

You can't put off being young until you retire.

...the breath that sharpens life is life itself...

The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.

I had a moral tutor, but never saw him (the only words of his I remember are 'The three pleasures of life -drinking, smoking, and masturbation')

Here is an unfenced existance

But O, Photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing!

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.

Mother's electric blanket broke, & I have 'mended' it, so she may be practising suttee involuntarily before long.

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

A good poem about failure is a success.

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

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

Life is first boredom, then fear,

What will survive of us is love.

- from A Writer

Most things may never happen: this one will.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.