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

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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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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Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
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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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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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It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
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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.
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We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
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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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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
Philip Larkin
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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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Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, And leaves what something hidden from us chose, And age, and then the only end of age.
Philip Larkin
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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
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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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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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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
Philip Larkin
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Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
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Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
Philip Larkin
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
Philip Larkin