Philip Larkin Quotes

“Librarianship was a good choice of profession for him, he claims, since ‘it has just the right blend of academic interest and administration that seems to match my particular talents, such as they are’.”
― James Booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

“Writing to Sutton in mid-December, he made a show of disdain for the duties of his new position: ‘I am entirely unassisted in my labours, and spend most of my time handing out tripey novels to morons. I feel it is not at all a suitable occupation for a man of acute sensibility and genius.”
― James Booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

“Larkin arrived in Wellington on 1 December 1943, an inexperienced, unworldly young man of twenty-one. It was, on the face of it, an unpromising place to start a literary career. ‘Too large to have the community spirit of a village and too small to engender the cultural activities of a larger town, it was an unremarkable little place with a built-in resistance to new ideas and even perhaps to newcomers.”
― James Booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

“Keatsian odes or reflective elegies which had formed the backbone of his early work (‘At Grass’, ‘Church Going’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Here’, ‘Dockery and Son’). Now he resumed the sequence, and over the next six years would complete four more, all focused directly or indirectly on the theme of death: ‘The Building’, ‘The Old Fools’, ‘Show Saturday’ and finally ‘Aubade’.”
― James Booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love