Robert Penn Warren

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

— Robert Penn Warren

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

— Robert Penn Warren

“And the testicles of the fathers hang down like old lace”

— Robert Penn Warren

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

— 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

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

— Robert Penn Warren

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

— 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

“Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able…

— 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

“To wake in some dawn and see / As though down a rifle barrel, lined up / Like sights, the self that…

— Robert Penn Warren

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or…

— Robert Penn Warren

There ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really…

— Robert Penn Warren

That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island…

— Robert Penn Warren

I turned around to face the reality, which was not something caught in the ice of the mind but was something now…

— Robert Penn Warren

“We all knew the great lesson of history; I from reading it and they from living it. And the lesson is: it…

— Robert Penn Warren

And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and…

— Robert Penn Warren

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to…

— 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,…

— Robert Penn Warren

“I'd be (...) lying there on my back with my clothes on and looking up at the ceiling and watching the cigarette…

— Robert Penn Warren

“The struggle for power conducted along logical lines is much more likely to occur in smoke-filled rooms than at the polls. The…

— Robert Penn Warren

Perhaps he had to be close in order to keep a reason for the things he did. To make the things he…

— Robert Penn Warren

“For Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is Death.…

— Robert Penn Warren

“In a way, the very success which the Boss laid on Tiny was his revenge on Tiny, for every time the Boss…

— Robert Penn Warren

“There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain. I was in the car. And I…

— Robert Penn Warren

...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break…

— Robert Penn Warren

“Season late, day late, sun just down, and the sky Cold gunmetal but with a wash of live rose, and she, From…

— Robert Penn Warren

“We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy tables, in which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken bones and…

— Robert Penn Warren

“A civil war is, may we say, the prototype of all war, for in the persons of fellow citizens who happen to…

— Robert Penn Warren

“I could lie there as long as I wanted, and let all the pictures of things a man might want run through…

— Robert Penn Warren

Dirt's a funny thing,' the Boss said. 'Come to think of it, there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's…

— Robert Penn Warren

“Willie went out and buttonholed folks on the street and tried to explain things to them. You could see Willie standing on…

— 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

“The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. ”

— 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

To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that…

— Robert Penn Warren

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

— 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

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

— Robert Penn Warren

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

— Robert Penn Warren