Philip Levine Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“I write what's given me to write.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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