Peter Levi Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

The desert is not an island: the island is not enchanted: and the desert is no habitation for men.

Peter Levi
What I liked about Greece was [...] the impressive force of the language itself, unconfined by dictionaries, spoken in the streets, in cafés and in the country.

Peter Levi
Free verse is all right, but you'd better know what you're doing before you indulge.

Peter Levi
I don't think there's anything so odd about being a classical scholar. It's just that most people aren't classical scholars because they don't know Greek and Latin, poor things. And if they did, they would just think like I do about it.

Peter Levi
Everyone must find their own way, take their own road, and see to the end of that road before they abandon it. Everyone must inevitably start from where they happen to be.

Peter Levi
I write from notebooks. I'm never without them. See, I can lose things in there, and know it doesn't matter, because sooner or later you're going to need something. Now you're in the rich hour where you've got something useless, but you feel you could use, so you write it down. For one long poem I can exhaust three years of notebooks.

Peter Levi
Without writing one just piles up like heaps of leaves. One doesn't know what is happening or who one is. And soon one will not dare ask, perhaps, any honest question. Or worse, one may stumble unguarded on some honest answer.

Peter Levi
Poetry is about life. The quality of your poetry will be the quality of your life. And you can't regulate that by a knob.

Peter Levi
Writing is like breathing or it ought to be. One's got to write poems. Like one has to go to church. Not out of social duty, or because there's any pressure on one to do so. Not even out of reaction to people who say one shouldn't do so. But just because of some decent, natural good behavior. One might as well go on with it.

Peter Levi
A poem can take two or three days to finish, usually two at the most because I can't stand the strain, can't hold it together. Though sometimes I go back to an old poem and finish it, when I thought I was going to leave it unfinished forever. Suddenly one feels relaxed and gleeful, and does anything.

Peter Levi
And we know from countless examples, from what we later call literature, that anyone can be a great writer.

Peter Levi