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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.

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
Thinking
West
Like
Writer
Pastoral
Rest
Bigots
Either
Coast
Full
Version
America
Versions
Ever
Desert
Think
East

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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.
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Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
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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.
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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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To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
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I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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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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I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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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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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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One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
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I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
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