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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
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Bigots
Either
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America
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Desert
Think
East
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Pastoral

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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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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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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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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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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To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
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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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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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It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
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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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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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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 sadder things, I think, Is how our birthdays slowly sink: Presents and parties disappear, The cards grow fewer year by year, Till, when one reaches sixty-five, How many care we're still alive?
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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
Philip Larkin
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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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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Many famous feet have trod Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed The strength they have against the strength they need And famous lips interrogated God Concerning franchise in eternity.
Philip Larkin
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
Philip Larkin