Philip Levine Quotes

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

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.

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He’s just too much himself and not you.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

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.