Philip Larkin Quotes

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.

You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.

What will survive of us is love.

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.

I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.

We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.

As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

Originality is being different from oneself, not others.

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP

I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action

To put one brick upon another, Add a third, and then a fourth, Leaves no time to wonder whether What you do has any worth.

I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn't matter if you've done anything or not.

I didn't choose poetry: poetry chose me.

I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.

A good poem about failure is a success.

You can't put off being young until you retire.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.

He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.

Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.

Selflessness is like waiting in a hospital In a badly-fitting suit on a cold wet morning. Selfishness is like listening to good jazz With drinks for further orders and a huge fire.

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.