Robert Penn Warren Quotes

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

Everything seems an echo of something else.

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

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

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

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.

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

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

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.

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

I longed to know the world's name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

History is all explained by geography.

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 (All The King's Men)

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

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

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?

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.

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

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

What is man but his passion?

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

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

For the truth is a terrible thing.

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

If a man knew how to live he would never die.

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.

For whatever you live is life.

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

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

There is no country but the heart.

That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is.

A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don't have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.