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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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Robert Penn Warren
Age: 84 †
Born: 1905
Born: April 24
Died: 1989
Died: September 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Guthrie
Kentucky
Write
Need
Real
Needs
Writing
Writers

More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

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If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.
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 given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, What do I really feel about this?
Robert Penn Warren
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But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.
Robert Penn Warren
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I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
Robert Penn Warren
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History is all explained by geography.
Robert Penn Warren
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The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
Robert Penn Warren
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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 Life. And not merely a delightful exercise of technical skill which man had been able to achieve because he, of all the animals, had a fine thumb. Which is nonsense, for whatever you live is Life.
Robert Penn Warren
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The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
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 and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.
Robert Penn Warren
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It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
Robert Penn Warren
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If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.
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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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.
Robert Penn Warren
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Everything seems an echo of something else.
Robert Penn Warren
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Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
Robert Penn Warren
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For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
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 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.
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 pain I can't do without.
Robert Penn Warren