Philip Larkin Quotes - Page 2

So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.

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.

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. Theyare to be happy in: Where can we live but days?

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for the most part our minds gloss such things over & until the ice finally lets us through we skate about merrily enough. Most people, I'm convinced, don't think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they're carried out feet first.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form.

I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.

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.

I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any - after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?

Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste.

Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.

To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about (That is, when you are young).

As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.

The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.