Philip Levine Quotes

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

I write what's given me to write.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.

Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here.

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.