Philip Levine may refer to:
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.
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
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.
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.
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with considerable justice, that they are being overlooked while others with less talent are out there making careers for themselves. I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you’ll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you’re able.
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.
I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.
I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.
You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.
How weightless words are when nothing will do.
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.
Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme. . . they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
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.
I write what's given me to write.