14 quotes
To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
Writing Home (1994)
I have no doubt that in heaven the angels will regard the blessed as a necessary evil.
Writing Home (1994)
The Channel is a slipper-bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom.
Writing Home (1994)
The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
Writing Home (1994)
He had never read Proust, but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions.
Writing Home (1994)
If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
Writing Home (1994)
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
Writing Home (1994)
He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball, or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth.
Writing Home (1994)
Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
Writing Home (1994)
An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail, listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
Writing Home (1994)
Writer: What, above all, I'm primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, that's it, really. I'm taking the pith out of reality.
Writing Home (1994)
Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
Writing Home (1994)
One of the good things about Larkin is that he still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing-line, whereas reading Auden is like doing a parachute-drop: for a while the view is wonderful, but then you end up on your back in the middle of a ploughed field and in the wrong county.
Writing Home (1994)
However, living in Tel Aviv, he was spared the fate of equivalent figures in English culture, an endless round of arts programmes where those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will be remembered only for remembering someone else.
Writing Home (1994)