Philip Levine Quotes

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.

You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw.

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.

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

I write what's given me to write.

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.

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.

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.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

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