Top 24 Quotes by Philip Levine

I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

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.

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.

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

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

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