Philip Levine Quotes

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

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.

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