LA Larkin Quotes

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.

Intolerance has been the curse of our country.

When I finally learned to let go of having to totally control everything around me and let my life unfold, I was stunned by the results. How could I have ever thought I could outsmart the Universe?

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

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.

As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.

What will survive of us is love.

Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP

Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.

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.

Comrades - We are living in momentous times!

It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about (That is, when you are young).

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.

One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.

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.

When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.

A good poem about failure is a success.

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.

I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.

Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.

I have tried to kill sectarianism, whether in Catholics or Protestants.

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.

No, men and women of the Irish race, we shall not fight for England. We shall fight for the destruction of the British Empire and the construction of an Irish republic.

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.'

This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.

I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.

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

I wonder love can have already set In dreams, when we've not met More times than I can number on one hand.

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 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?

To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.

The employers cannot carry on industry nor accumulate profits if they have not got the good will of the workers or their acquiescence in carrying on such industry.

We make mistakes, we have our faults, and God knows some of us have more than our share, but when danger threatens and duty calls, we go smiling to our own funeral.

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

The souls you have got cast upon the screen of publicity appear like the horrid and writhing creatures enlarged from the insect world, and revealed to us by the cinematograph.

The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland

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

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?

Stop at home. Arm for Ireland. Fight for Ireland and no other land.

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.

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

Here is an unfenced existance

My mother, who hates thunderstorms, Holds up each summer day and shakes It out suspiciously, lest swarms Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there.

We are now on the threshold of a newer movement, with a newer hope and a new inspiration.