Philip Larkin Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Any memory for the most part depending on chance. — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

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

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

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

There is bad in all good authors — Philip Larkin

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

books are a load of crap — Philip Larkin

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

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere. — Philip Larkin

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

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

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

Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth. — Philip Larkin

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.' — Philip Larkin

What will survive of us is love. — Philip Larkin

But superstition, like belief, must die ... — Philip Larkin

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

The difficult part of love
Is being selfish enough ... — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

I like Philip Larkin an awful lot; I really like his view on life, and I really connect to it. — Domhnall Gleeson

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 — Philip Larkin

Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland. — Philip Larkin

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

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

I have wished you something
None of the others would ... — Philip Larkin

Clearly money has something to do with life ... — Philip Larkin

Get stewed:Books are a load of crap. — Philip Larkin

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

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

Life is slow dying. — Philip Larkin

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

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

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

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

Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood. — Philip Larkin

It's unthinkable not to love -you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin. — Lawrence Durrell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 — Philip Larkin

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

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 — Philip Larkin

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

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

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

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

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

Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round. — Philip Larkin

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

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. — Philip Larkin

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

Poetry is emotional in nature and theatrical in operation. — Philip Larkin

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

They say eyes clear with age. — Philip Larkin

Here is unfenced existence — Philip Larkin

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? — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles. — Philip Larkin

Walk with the dead
For fear of death. — Philip Larkin

I am awakened each dawn
Increasingly to fear ... — Philip Larkin

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

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

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. — Philip Larkin

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

Still, vicious or virtuous,
Love suits most of us. — Philip Larkin

Only in books the flat and final happens,
Only in dreams we meet and interlock ... — Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now! — Alan Bennett

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth. — Philip Larkin

Most things may never happen: this one will. — Philip Larkin

What will survive of us is love.

- from A Writer — Philip Larkin

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged. — Robert Morgan

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

Life is first boredom, then fear, — Philip Larkin

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence. — Philip Larkin

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

A good poem about failure is a success. — Philip Larkin

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

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

Originality is being different from oneself, not others. — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing. — Philip Larkin

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

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 — Philip Larkin

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

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

Here is an unfenced existance — Philip Larkin

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') — Philip Larkin

The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits. — Philip Larkin

...the breath that sharpens life is life itself... — Philip Larkin

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

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