Philip Levine quotes

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong. (Philip Levine)
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs. View quote
Philip Levine
No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you. View quote
Philip Levine
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. View quote
Philip Levine
It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work. View quote
Philip Levine
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion. View quote
Philip Levine
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. View quote
Philip Levine
I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home. View quote
Philip Levine
I write what's given me to write. View quote
Philip Levine
If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem. View quote
Philip Levine
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist. (Philip Levine)
I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity. View quote
Philip Levine
Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it. View quote
Philip Levine
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry. View quote
Philip Levine
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. View quote
Philip Levine
My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family. View quote
Philip Levine
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. View quote
Philip Levine
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet. View quote
Philip Levine
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory. View quote
Philip Levine
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. View quote
Philip Levine
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet. (Philip Levine)
I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change. View quote
Philip Levine
But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity. View quote
Philip Levine
You have begun to separate the dark from the dark. View quote
Philip Levine
I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back. View quote
Philip Levine

Philip Levine

Philip Levine - Image
Photo: Wikimedia commons, CC BY 2.5
Occupation: American Poet
Born: January 10, 1928
Died: February 14, 2015
Quotes count: 28