Top 24 Quotes by Philip Levine

I write what's given me to write.

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

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

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

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.

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

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.

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