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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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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
Envelopes
Tell
Aspiring
Two
Manuscripts
Self
Addressed
Writing
Poets
Things
Sent
Throw
Stamped
Poet
Envelope

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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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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
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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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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
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Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
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One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
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We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
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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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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
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Life is first boredom, then fear.
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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
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But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards
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Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
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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.
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This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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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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It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
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