A Quote by Philip Larkin

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

Philip Larkin

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About About Yourself Novels Other People Poems Yourself

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Philip Larkin
English - Novelist
August 9, 1922 - December 2, 1985

Poems don't have to rhyme... Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.

Nikki Giovanni

In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s.

Mohsin Hamid

People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.

Claire Tomalin

I started to write my own stories, like small novels, and those novels became poems, and after poems, they became lyrics, and song came from that.

Dawn Richard

I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.

Dana Spiotta

All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.

Christina Stead

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

Northrop Frye

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

Zadie Smith

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

Zadie Smith

I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.

Haruki Murakami

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

Rebecca West

I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better if they're about people the writer doesn't like very much.

Penelope Fitzgerald

My days are filled with work I love - reading poems, writing poems, talking with people about poems, teaching, directing a writing program, hosting readings, etc.

Deborah Landau

I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.

Langston Hughes

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.

Charles Bukowski

I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.

Paul Auster

A Quote by Philip Larkin

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