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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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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
Good
Bound
Bounds
Decide
Poetry
Instead
Intellectually
Write
Fatal
Writing
Poems
Trying
Honour

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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
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The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough.
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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.
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It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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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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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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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.
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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.
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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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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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In everyone there sleeps. A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make. By loving others, but across most it sweeps. As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures.
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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.
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To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
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Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
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... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
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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.
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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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