Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
“I work all day, and get half drunk at night,” Larkin wrote in his 1977 poem “Aubade.” A few years later he described his real-life (and not so dissimilar) routine to The Paris Review:
My life is as simple as I can make it. Work all day, cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink, television in the evenings. I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time–some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next. Or there’s my way–making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.
Larkin worked as a librarian for almost his entire adult life, realizing early on that he would never be able to make a living from his writing alone. “I was brought up to think you had to have a job, and write in your spare time, like Trollope,” he said. Although he admitted to wondering what would have happened had he been able to write full-time, he also though that two hours of composition in the evenings, after dinner and the dishes, was plenty: “After that you’re going round in circles, and it’s much better to leave it for twenty-four hours, by which time your subconscious or whatever has solved the block and you’re ready to go on.”
* Source: Daily Rituals by Mason Currey