Quote

Give me a thrill, says the reader, Give me a kick I don't care how you succeed, or What subject you pick.

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
Give
Pick
Care
Picks
Giving
Subject
Succeed
Subjects
Reader
Kick
Says
Thrill
Reading
Kicks

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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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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.
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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.
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I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
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Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.
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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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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
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Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.
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Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
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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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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
Philip Larkin
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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
Philip Larkin
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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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Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
Philip Larkin