Robert Penn Warren
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Poetry
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.Collection: Poetry
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.
I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.Collection: History
The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.Collection: Common Humanity
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 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.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Thinking
Everything seems an echo of something else.Collection: Echoes
The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.Collection: Light
And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.Collection: Devil
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.Collection: Blood
Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.Collection: Men
If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.Collection: Past
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.Collection: Real
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 ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.Collection: Distance
Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.Collection: Goodness
If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.Collection: Happiness
In separateness only does love learn definition.Collection: Doe
History is all explained by geography.Collection: Geography
The past is always a rebuke to the present.Collection: Past
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Ambition
It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.Collection: Self
Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff...Willie, make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em mad, even mad at you. Stir them up and they'll love it and come back for more, but, for heaven's sakes, don't try to improve their minds.Collection: Boys
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.Collection: Writing
Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?Collection: Happiness
The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.Collection: Writing
There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain.Collection: Rain
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.Collection: Meaningful
A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.Collection: Heart
I longed to know the world's name.Collection: Names
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.Collection: Inspirational
There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.Collection: Garden
Tell me a story of deep delight.Collection: Stories
...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.Collection: Men
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)Collection: Kings
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.Collection: Meaningful
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.Collection: People
America was based on a big promise--a great big one: the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in the house, that's quite a problem--particularly when you've got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America--you see, that saddle's going to jump now and then and it pricks.Collection: Children
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?Collection: Thinking
Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.Collection: Moving
If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.Collection: Real
In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.Collection: Spring
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 back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.Collection: Mother