Robert Penn Warren quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Robert Penn Warren 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.

There is no country but the heart.

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

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

You don't choose a story, it chooses you.

A man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.

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

The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.

What is love?/One name for it is knowledge.

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

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

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.

History is all explained by geography.

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

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.

What is man but his passion?

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.

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

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

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

Everything seems an echo of something else.

And the testicles of the fathers hang down like old lace

In separateness only does love learn definition.

I longed to know the world's name.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

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.

A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.

For whatever you live is life.

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

For the truth is a terrible thing.

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

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

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

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

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

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

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

A friend of your youth is the only friend you ever have..

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

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

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

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

[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.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

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

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

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

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.

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.

For everything there is a season / But there is the dream / Of a season past all seasons.

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

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

Tell me a story of deep delight.

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

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

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

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

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