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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.

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
Came
Cushion
Better
Cushions
Much
Sinful
Think
Subversive
Thinking
Regarded
Hide
Poetry
Somebody

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
Philip Larkin
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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 breath that sharpens life is life itself.
Philip Larkin
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I have wished you something None of the others would.
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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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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
Philip Larkin
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Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
Philip Larkin
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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
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
Philip Larkin
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I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
Philip Larkin
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
Philip Larkin
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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