Philip Levine

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'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

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.

I'm not afraid of wanting money at all. Money will give me more power to do things that are truer to my spirit than what I'm already doing.

It took me realizing that a broken heart has never actually killed anyone to find the courage to ask for what I want, in just about every situation. That was part of my own growing up.

Before I die, I will preach to the Muslims in the Arab world. I will preach in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. I will preach in Tehran. I will do it under the umbrella of God. And see its impact.