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

~ Philip Larkin #BOTD 1922

"I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me."
~ Philip Larkin

"Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transference."
~ Philip Larkin

"Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth."
~ Philip Larkin

"What will survive of us is love."
~ Philip Larkin

"Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself."
~ Philip Larkin

"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

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

"You can look out of your life like a train and see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train."
~ Philip Larkin

"A good poem about failure is a success."
~ Philip Larkin

"Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland."
~ Philip Larkin

"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

"Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ...
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
and the Beatles first LP"
~ Philip Larkin

"Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end."
~ Philip Larkin

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

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

"Originality is being different from oneself, not others."
~ Philip Larkin

"Something, like nothing, happens anywhere."
~ Philip Larkin