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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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Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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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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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
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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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Give me a thrill, says the reader, Give me a kick I don't care how you succeed, or What subject you pick.
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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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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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.
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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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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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This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
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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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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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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.
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I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
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The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.
Philip Larkin