Philip Larkin Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• I didn't choose poetry: poetry chose me.

  Philip Larkin

  Philip Larkin, Brian Dyson (1989). “The Modern Academic Library: Essays in Memory of Philip Larkin”, Library Assn Pub Limited

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• 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

  Pain, Years, House

  Philip Larkin, “Why DID I Dream Of You Last Night?”

  23 Copy quote

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

  Philip Larkin

  Echoes, Woods, Firsts

  Philip Larkin (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.26, Faber & Faber

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• Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

  Philip Larkin

  Iceland, Hang Over, Ifs

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

  Philip Larkin

  Retirement, Young, Retiring

  Philip Larkin (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.136, Faber & Faber

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• 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

  Crazy, Odd, Finnegans Wake

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• 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

  Art, Suicidal, Thinking

  Philip Larkin (2012). “Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica”, Faber & Faber

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

  Philip Larkin

  Art, Lying, Thinking

  7 Copy quote

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

  Philip Larkin

  Writing, Thinking, Wells

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• Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.

  Philip Larkin

  Death, Rounds

  Philip Larkin (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.171, Faber & Faber

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• 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

  Writing, Sleep, Organization

  "Philip Larkin's Everyday Poetry" by Henry Allen, www.washingtonpost.com. June 3, 1989.

  15 Copy quote

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

  Philip Larkin

  Age, Three, Should

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• 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

  Thinking, America, East

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• To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.

  Philip Larkin

  Writing, Sober, Feds

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• 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

  Thinking, Feet, Ice

  Letter to J.B.Sutton, October 30, 1949.

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• 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

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Philip Larkin (2012). “Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982”, p.41, Faber & Faber

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• Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

  Philip Larkin

  Poetry, Wordsworth, Deprivation

  Reply to question "Do you think people go around feeling they haven't got out of life what life has to offer?"- Required Writing (1983) p. 47

  108 Copy quote

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

  Philip Larkin

  Writing, Easy, Young

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Unique, Sanity, Affair

  "Required Writing-Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982". Book by Philip Larkin, Farrar Strauss, 1984.

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

  Philip Larkin

  Writing, Pity, Good Authors

  Philip Larkin (2012). “Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica”, Faber & Faber

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• 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

  Novelists, Poet, Ifs

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• 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

  Writing, Trying, Good Poetry

  Philip Larkin (2012). “Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982”, p.72, Faber & Faber

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• Life is first boredom, then fear.

  Philip Larkin

  Boredom, Firsts, Life Is

  'Dockery & Son' (1964)

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• One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.

  Philip Larkin

  Dames, Life Is, Quirks

  Philip Larkin (2012). “Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica”, Faber & Faber

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• One of the sadder things, I think,
  Is how our birthdays slowly sink:
  Presents and parties disappear,
  The cards grow fewer year by year,
  Till, when one reaches sixty-five,
  How many care we're still alive?

  Philip Larkin

  Party, Thinking, Years

  Philip Larkin (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.176, Faber & Faber

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