I think … someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex – its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what's more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn't. And I suspect that means not that I can enjoy sex in my own quiet way but that I can't enjoy it at all. It's like rugby football: either you like kicking & being kicked, or your soul cringes away from the whole affair. There's no way of quietly enjoying rugby football.
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Letter to Monica Jones (1 November 1951) as quoted in "Philip Larkin's women" (23 October 2010)Philip Larkin
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For Irishmen, there is no football game to match rugby and if all our young men played rugby not only would we beat England and Wales but France and the whole lot of them put together.
Eamon de Valera
Damn, I love drinking. Drinking and watching rugby. I note it's your Superbowl this weekend, my Yanqui friends. I think it's really nice that in your otherwise primitive society you make such a big deal about men playing a Girl's game. Which must not be mistaken for rugby, as you know, for rugby is a game for Men and Women. American football? Girl's game. Right up there with netball. England are about to play Wales at rugby, and it's on here at the pub. Camera closes in on the England team: scarred mutants to a man, with big weird bald patches where the hair has been ripped right out of their scalps in handfuls.
Warren Ellis
Some footballers earn a fortune. 30 grand, 40 grand, 90 grand a week, some of them. And then they say stuff in interviews like "I'm not really enjoying the football at the moment." Not enjoying the football? 90 grand a week? I'd be f**king delirious with it! I wouldn't just hug somebody for scoring a goal, I'd shag 'em.
Lee Evans
I've seen him a couple of times in the arena, and was profoundly impressed by his virtuosity. Rugby football is more or less a sealed book to me, I never having gone in for it, but even I could see he was good. The lissomness with which he moved hither and thither was most impressive, as was his homicidal ardour when doing what I believe is called tackling. Like the Canadian Mounted Police he always got his man, and when he did so the air was vibrant with the excited cries of the morticians in the audience making bids for the body.
P. G. Wodehouse
My Aunt Agatha, for instance, is tall and thin and looks rather like a vulture in the Gobi desert, while Aunt Dahlia is short and solid, like a scrum half in the game of Rugby football. In disposition, too, they differ widely. Aunt Agatha is cold and haughty, though presumably unbending a bit when conducting human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, as she is widely rumoured to do, and her attitude towards me has always been that of an austere governess, causing me to feel as if I were six years old and she had just caught me stealing jam from the jam cupboard: whereas Aunt Dahlia is as jovial and bonhomous as a dame in a Christmas pantomime.
P. G. Wodehouse
Larkin, Philip
Laroche, Hermann
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