Top 24 Quotes by Philip Levine

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

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.

I write what's given me to write.

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.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

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.

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.