Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.
Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock.
Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.
We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about (That is, when you are young).
No one can tear your thread out of himself. No one can tie you down or set you free.
And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
I have started to say "A quarter of a century" Or "thirty years back" About my own life.
I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.
Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.
As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.
I wonder love can have already set In dreams, when we've not met More times than I can number on one hand.
Give me a thrill, says the reader, Give me a kick; I don't care how you succeed, or What subject you pick.
One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back
In times when nothing stood but worsened, or grew strange, there was one constant good: she did not change.
Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.'' Philip Larkin
I like spaghetti because you don't have to take your eyes off the book to pick about among it, it's all the same.
I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
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.
The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
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.'
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.
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.
Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.
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?
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her backA huge and birdless silence. In her wakeNo waters breed or break.
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.
Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm; And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
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 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?
My mother, who hates thunderstorms, Holds up each summer day and shakes It out suspiciously, lest swarms Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there.
I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.