Top 100 Philip Larkin's Quotes
#1. A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like ... a version of pastoral.
Philip Larkin
#2. Originality is being different from oneself, not others.
Philip Larkin
#4. Ought we to smile / Perhaps make friends? No: in the race for seats / You're best alone. Friendship is not worth while.
Philip Larkin
#5. Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.
Philip Larkin
#6. Still, vicious or virtuous,
Love suits most of us.
Philip Larkin
#7. Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit,
Whatever they are ...
Philip Larkin
#8. 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.
Philip Larkin
#9. Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about ...
Philip Larkin
#10. Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
Philip Larkin
#11. Morning, noon & bloody night,
Seven sodding days a week,
I slave at filthy WORK, that might
Be done by any book-drunk freak.
This goes on until I kick the bucket.
FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT
Philip Larkin
#12. Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow.
Philip Larkin
#13. ...the breath that sharpens life is life itself...
Philip Larkin
#15. 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
#16. Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
Philip Larkin
#17. A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.
Philip Larkin
#18. Everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly.
Philip Larkin
#19. I like Philip Larkin an awful lot; I really like his view on life, and I really connect to it.
Domhnall Gleeson
#20. Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
Philip Larkin
#21. I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else,
Philip Larkin
#22. Sex means nothing
just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Philip Larkin
#23. 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
#24. I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.
Philip Larkin
#25. Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments ...
Philip Larkin
#26. 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.
Philip Larkin
#27. 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
#28. Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter;
And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.
Philip Larkin
#29. It's unthinkable not to love -you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
Lawrence Durrell
#30. 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
#31. I suppose if one lives to be old, one's entire waking life will be spent turning on the spit of recollection over the fires of mingled shame, pain or remorse. Cheerful prospect!
Philip Larkin
#32. It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about
(That is, when you are young) ...
Philip Larkin
#33. 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.
Philip Larkin
#34. They both rise / Make for the Coke dispenser. 'What's he like? / Christ, I just told you.
Philip Larkin
#35. 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
#36. Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness, where I just switch off everything except the scant intelligence necessary to keep me going. God, the people are awful - great carved monstrosities from the sponge-stone of secondratedness. Hideous.
Philip Larkin
#37. They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
Philip Larkin
#38. 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
#39. And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
Philip Larkin
#40. The sight of the money depressed her, because in such small familiar things the foreign country around her was best expressed.
Philip Larkin
#41. On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.
Philip Larkin
#42. I have wished you something
None of the others would ...
Philip Larkin
#43. Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.
Robert Morgan
#44. I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.
Philip Larkin
#45. 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.
Philip Larkin
#46. There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Philip Larkin
#47. The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
Philip Larkin
#48. SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
Philip Larkin
#49. Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Philip Larkin
#50. The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
From The Mower
Philip Larkin
#52. It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
Philip Larkin
#53. 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
#54. 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
#56. Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.' Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
#57. Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
Philip Larkin
#58. Earth never grieves, I thought, walking across the park, watching seagulls cruising greedily above the ground looking for heaven knows what. Don't you think it's a good line? A very good line
Philip Larkin
#59. Clearly money has something to do with life ...
Philip Larkin
#60. What will survive of us is love.
- from A Writer
Philip Larkin
#61. Why can't one stop being a son without becoming a father?
Philip Larkin
#62. I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
Philip Larkin
#63. My age fallen away like white swaddling
Floats in the middle distance, becomes
An inhabited cloud.
Philip Larkin
#64. 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
#65. Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn ...
Philip Larkin
#66. I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
Philip Larkin
#67. Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Philip Larkin
#68. 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
#69. Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.
Philip Larkin
#70. In times when nothing stood / but worsened, or grew strange / there was one constant good: / she did not change.
Philip Larkin
#73. You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.
Philip Larkin
#74. Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can't for long conceal the toxic spots on your character - Philip Larkin is Exhibit A - nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.
William Giraldi
#75. 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.
Philip Larkin
#76. I listen to money singing, it's like looking down from long French windows at a provincial town. The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad ...
Philip Larkin
#77. To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted
Philip Larkin
#78. Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.
Philip Larkin
#79. Life is first boredom, then fear.
whether or not we use it, it goes,
and leaves what something hidden from us chose,
and age, and then the only end of age.
Philip Larkin
#80. One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
Philip Larkin
#81. 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
#82. I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
Philip Larkin
#83. How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.
Philip Larkin
#84. Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on - in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.
Philip Larkin
#86. But O, Photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing!
Philip Larkin
#87. No one can tear your thread out of himself.
No one can tie you down or set you free.
Philip Larkin
#89. My mother, who hates thunderstorms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there ...
Philip Larkin
#90. A good meal can somewhat repair / The eatings of slight love
Philip Larkin
#91. Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off.
Philip Larkin
#92. Mother's electric blanket broke, & I have 'mended' it, so she may be practising suttee involuntarily before long.
Philip Larkin
#93. I was sleeping, and you woke me
To walk on the chilled shore
Of a night with no memory,
Till your voice forsook my ear
Till your two hands withdrew
And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold hill of stars.
Philip Larkin
#94. Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison
Just for paying a few bills! That's out of proportion.
Philip Larkin
#95. Parents fuck you up. They don't mean to but they do.
Philip Larkin
#97. 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
#99. 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.
Philip Larkin
#100. And I am sick for want of sleep;
So sick, that I can half-believe
The soundless river pouring from the cave
Is neither strong nor deep;
Only an image fancied in conceit.
Philip Larkin
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