1. “A good poem about failure is a success.” Philip Larkin
2. “Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock.” Philip Larkin
3. “I don’t think I write well – just better than anyone else.” Philip Larkin
4. “I didn’t choose poetry: poetry chose me.” Philip Larkin
5. “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.” Philip Larkin
6. “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.” Philip Larkin
7. “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.” Philip Larkin
8. “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.” Philip Larkin
9. “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” Philip Larkin
10. “Originality is being different from oneself, not others.” Philip Larkin
11. “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.” Philip Larkin
12. “Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.” Philip Larkin
13. “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.” Philip Larkin
14. “What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days?” Philip Larkin
15. “Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.” Philip Larkin
16. “I have no enemies. But my friends don’t like me.” Philip Larkin
17. “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.” Philip Larkin
18. “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.” Philip Larkin
19. “As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn’t like.” Philip Larkin
20. “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.” Philip Larkin
21. “What will survive of us is love.” Philip Larkin
22. “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.” Philip Larkin
23. “Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.”Philip Larkin
24. “We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind. While there is still time.” Philip Larkin
25. “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?” Philip Larkin
26. “You can’t put off being young until you retire.” Philip Larkin
27. “There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn’t true!” Philip Larkin
28. “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
29. “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.” Philip Larkin
30. “To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.” Philip Larkin
31. “You can look out of your life like a train & see what you’re heading for, but you can’t stop the train.” Philip Larkin
32. “Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.” Philip Larkin
33. “This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.” Philip Larkin
34. “Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.” Philip Larkin
35. “How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It’s sad, really.” Philip Larkin
