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

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
Write
Else
Better
Wells
Well
Writing
Think
Thinking
Anyone

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.
Philip Larkin
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One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
Philip Larkin
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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
Philip Larkin
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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
Philip Larkin
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Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.
Philip Larkin
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
Philip Larkin
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To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
Philip Larkin
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
Philip Larkin
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
Philip Larkin
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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
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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
Philip Larkin
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
Philip Larkin
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
Philip Larkin
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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Philip Larkin
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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
Philip Larkin
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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
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I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.
Philip Larkin
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
Philip Larkin
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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
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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.
Philip Larkin