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To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
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
Feds
Sober
Warm
Loved
Write
Must
Writing
More quotes by Philip Larkin
... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
Philip Larkin
I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.
Philip Larkin
Many famous feet have trod Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed The strength they have against the strength they need And famous lips interrogated God Concerning franchise in eternity.
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
One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
Philip Larkin
Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
Philip Larkin
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
The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough.
Philip Larkin
To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
Philip Larkin
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs: Despite the artful tensions of the calendar, The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites, The costly aversion of the eyes from death- Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.
Philip Larkin
In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
Philip Larkin
This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
Philip Larkin
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
Philip Larkin
Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous, Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water, Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter And those she has least use for see her best, Their paths grown craven and circuitous, Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.
Philip Larkin
Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone finality They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
Philip Larkin
SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
Philip Larkin
I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
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
Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Philip Larkin
Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
Philip Larkin