How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

- Philip Levine

I write what's given me to write.

- Philip Levine

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I rec…

- Philip Levine

Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with conside…

- Philip Levine

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

- Philip Levine

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

- Philip Levine

Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, t…

- Philip Levine

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

- Philip Levine

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

- Philip Levine