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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.

Philip Larkin

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Philip Larkin
Age: 63 †
Born: 1922
Born: August 9
Died: 1985
Died: December 2
Critic
Journalist
Librarian
Music Critic
Music Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Coventry
England
UK
Philip Arthur Larkin
Enjoyable
Poems
Novels
Deeper
Seem
Novel
Seems
Broader
Writing
Richer

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
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Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back
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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.
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The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
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I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.
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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
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... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Philip Larkin
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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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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.
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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?
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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
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It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
Philip Larkin
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I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
Philip Larkin
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
Philip Larkin
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
Philip Larkin