Top 24 Quotes by Philip Levine

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.