Robert Penn Warren Quotes

81 quotes in 987 categories

• 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 image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
• 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.
• Perhaps he had to be close in order to keep a reason for the things he did. To make the things he did be themselves…
• How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
• How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in…
• Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
• The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
• 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…
• Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.
• You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
• There is no country but the heart.
• The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.
• We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?
• A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us…
• When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it…
• All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.
• You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.
• 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…

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