Writer Quotes by Robert Penn Warren

9 Writer quotes by Robert Penn Warren

All Writer quotes Robert Penn Warren’s page

Robert Penn Warren’s thoughts on the writer’s craft are distilled into nine concise reflections. They capture his belief in narrative as a moral force, giving readers a succinct yet meaningful glimpse into his literary ethos.

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

Robert Penn Warren

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

Robert Penn Warren

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

Robert Penn Warren

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

Robert Penn Warren

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I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of…

Robert Penn Warren

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

Robert Penn Warren

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Most writers are trying to find what they think or feel. . . not simply working from the given, but toward the…

Robert Penn Warren

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In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying…

Robert Penn Warren

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In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems…

Robert Penn Warren

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More by 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 anyway.

Robert Penn Warren

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“The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn’t…

Robert Penn Warren

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

Robert Penn Warren

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

Robert Penn Warren

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“No, the Boss corrected, I'm not a lawyer. I know some law. ... but I'm not a lawyer. That's why I can see what…

Robert Penn Warren

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[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…

Robert Penn Warren

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“Those were the ones which would turn loose their grip on the branch before long-- not in any breeze, the fibers would just relax,…

Robert Penn Warren

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

Robert Penn Warren

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“He thought of night coming on. He thought of the loneliness of tonight, this first night in the ground. This, he thought, was the…

Robert Penn Warren

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

Robert Penn Warren

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

Robert Penn Warren

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The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall…

Robert Penn Warren

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Process as process is neither morally good nor morally bad. We may judge results but not process. The morally bad agent may perform the…

Robert Penn Warren

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The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill…

Robert Penn Warren

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For the truth is a terrible thing.

Robert Penn Warren

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