Poet Philip Larkin

"Nothing, like something, happens everywhere."

"I didn't choose poetry; poetry chose me."

Shunning travel, he preferred to stay in the remote environs of Hull, where he bicycled to his job as University of Hull librarian for more than 40 years. He said, "Novelists need to travel, poets re-create the familiar."

Larkin said: "I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any. Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth."

-Writer's Almanac