Robert Penn Warren quotes

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)
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
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. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
The best luck always happens to people who don't need it. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
Everything seems an echo of something else. (Robert Penn Warren)
The end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
I longed to know the world's name. View quote
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. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
In separateness only does love learn definition. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
A young man's ambition - to get along in the world and make a place for himself - half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem." (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, and [...] if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
Tell me a story. In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances, and starlight. The name of the story will be Time, But you must not pronounce its name. Tell me a story of deep delight. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
Most writers are trying to find what they think or feel... not simply working from the given, but toward the given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, "What do I really feel about this?" View quote
Robert Penn Warren