Philip Larkin Quotes

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet’s own perception in unique and original verbal form.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

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

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

A good poem about failure is a success.

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

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

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

What will survive of us is love.

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

They say eyes clear with age.

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.