Philip Larkin Quotes

"Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth."

"Far too many relied on the classic formula of a beginning, a muddle, and an end."

"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."

"I dream about that sometimes-and wake up screaming. With any luck they'll pass me over."

"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?"

"I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day."

"In everyone there sleeps. A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make. By loving others, but across most it sweeps. As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures."

"Nothing, like something, happens anywhere."

"The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously."

"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."