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

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.
Philip Larkin

They say eyes clear with age.
Philip Larkin

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

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.
Philip Larkin

Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.
Philip Larkin

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

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