Philip Larkin Quotes
A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.
Larkin, Philip. Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982. Faber and Faber, 1983.
Stalin was then only 26 years old. This was more than a decade BEFORE the Russian Revolution and Stalin was a young left wing revolutionary planning how to bring about a revolution and how the society should operate thereafter. He was then much the youthful, intellectual, Georgian idealist. The Russian upper class all spoke Russian and usually French and English as well. But the working class only spoke a single language—their native language which was for huge numbers of Russians, not Russian. It was Ukrainian, Georgian, and many others.
Philip Arthur Larkin CH CBE FRSL was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, articles gathered in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985), and he edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir John Betjeman.
