Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Philip Larkin

Image
Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
Philip Larkin
Image
What are days for? Days are where we live.
Philip Larkin
Image
This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
Philip Larkin
Image
Clearly money has something to do with life.
Philip Larkin
Image
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.
Philip Larkin
Image
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
Image
I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
Philip Larkin
Image
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.
Philip Larkin
Image
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
Image
Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
Philip Larkin
Image
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
Image
I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.
Philip Larkin
Image
Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Philip Larkin
Image
In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
Philip Larkin
Image
I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
Philip Larkin
Image
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
Image
One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
Philip Larkin
Image
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.
Philip Larkin
Image
Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
Philip Larkin
Image
As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.
Philip Larkin