Robert Penn Warren Quotes: top 58 famous quotes about Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Robert Penn Warren quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without. — Robert Penn Warren

There is no country but the heart. — Robert Penn Warren

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write. — Robert Penn Warren

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography. — Robert Penn Warren

You don't choose a story, it chooses you. — Robert Penn Warren

A man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them. — Robert Penn Warren

I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time. — Robert Penn Warren

The best luck always happens to people who don't need it. — Robert Penn Warren

What is love?/One name for it is knowledge. — Robert Penn Warren

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. — Robert Penn Warren

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it. — Robert Penn Warren

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that. — Robert Penn Warren

History is all explained by geography. — Robert Penn Warren

It is a human defect
to try to know one's self by the self of another. — Robert Penn Warren

You are dehydrated," I said. "The result of alcohol taken in excess. But that is the only way to take it. It is the only way to do a man any good. — Robert Penn Warren

What is man but his passion? — Robert Penn Warren

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this. — Robert Penn Warren

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it. — Robert Penn Warren

The Yankee dollar and Confederate dumbness combined to heal the wounds of four years of fratricidal strife ... — Robert Penn Warren

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we? — Robert Penn Warren

Everything seems an echo of something else. — Robert Penn Warren

And the testicles of the fathers hang down like old lace — Robert Penn Warren

In separateness only does love learn definition. — Robert Penn Warren

I longed to know the world's name. — Robert Penn Warren

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world. — Robert Penn Warren

So little time we live in Time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for Eternity. — Robert Penn Warren

A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect. — Robert Penn Warren

For whatever you live is life. — Robert Penn Warren

Any act of pure perception is a feat, and if you don't believe it, try it sometime. But — Robert Penn Warren

For the truth is a terrible thing. — Robert Penn Warren

Goodness ... You got to make it out of badness ... Because there isn't anything else to make it out of. — Robert Penn Warren

The past is always a rebuke to the present. — Robert Penn Warren

She lifted her sewing and bit off the thread in the way women do to make your flesh crawl. — Robert Penn Warren

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. — Robert Penn Warren

Dying
shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying? — Robert Penn Warren

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of. — Robert Penn Warren

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure. — Robert Penn Warren

A friend of your youth is the only friend you ever have.. — Robert Penn Warren

But listen here, there ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. — Robert Penn Warren

And when anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius. It's — Robert Penn Warren

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see. — Robert Penn Warren

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time. — Robert Penn Warren

[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time. — Robert Penn Warren

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life. — Robert Penn Warren

You don't write poems sitting at a typewriter; you write them swimming or climbing a mountain or walking. — Robert Penn Warren

There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage. — Robert Penn Warren

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past. — Robert Penn Warren

What if angry vectors veer Round your sleeping head, and form. There's never need to fear Violence of the poor world's abstract storm. — Robert Penn Warren

To be an American is not ... a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea
and history is the image of that idea. — Robert Penn Warren

For everything there is a season / But there is the dream / Of a season past all seasons. — Robert Penn Warren

But I knew how the play would come out. This was like a dress rehearsal after the show has closed down. — Robert Penn Warren

For what blessing may a man hope for but
An immortality in
The loving vigilance of death. — Robert Penn Warren

Tell me a story of deep delight. — Robert Penn Warren

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life. — Robert Penn Warren

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money. — Robert Penn Warren

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it ... if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you. — Robert Penn Warren

If you want him to do it, you've got to change the picture of the world inside his head. — Robert Penn Warren

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other. — Robert Penn Warren