75 Quotes by Philip Levine

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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