Top 136 Quotes & Sayings by Philip Larkin

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English novelist Philip Larkin.

Last updated on November 21, 2024.

Philip Arthur Larkin was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, with his articles gathered in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985), and edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir John Betjeman.

English - Novelist | August 9, 1922 - December 2, 1985

Source: Wikipedia

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

Philip Larkin

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

Philip Larkin

They say eyes clear with age.

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

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.

Philip Larkin

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Philip Larkin

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

Philip Larkin

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

Philip Larkin

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?

Philip Larkin

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

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

Philip Larkin

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

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

Philip Larkin

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

Philip Larkin

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

Philip Larkin

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

Philip Larkin

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.

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

If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for the most part our minds gloss such things over & until the ice finally lets us through we skate about merrily enough. Most people, I'm convinced, don't think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they're carried out feet first.

Philip Larkin

Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.

Philip Larkin

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

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

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

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

Philip Larkin

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

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

Philip Larkin

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

Philip Larkin

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

Philip Larkin

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

Philip Larkin

A good poem about failure is a success.

Philip Larkin

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

Philip Larkin

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.

Philip Larkin

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

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

What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin

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

Philip Larkin

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.

Philip Larkin

Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

Philip Larkin

As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.

Philip Larkin

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

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

Philip Larkin

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?

Philip Larkin

I didn't choose poetry: poetry chose me.

Philip Larkin

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

Philip Larkin

Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste.

Philip Larkin

Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.

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

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

Philip Larkin

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

Philip Larkin

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

Philip Larkin

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.

Philip Larkin

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

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

Philip Larkin

Originality is being different from oneself, not others.

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

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

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

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.

Philip Larkin

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

Top 136 Quotes & Sayings by Philip Larkin

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