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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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Robert Penn Warren
Age: 84 †
Born: 1905
Born: April 24
Died: 1989
Died: September 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Guthrie
Kentucky
Image
Ordinary
Confusions
Fiction
Purged
Writing
Distractions
Life
Presents
Distraction
Confusion
Accidents

More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

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Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.
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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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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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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You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
Robert Penn Warren
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History is all explained by geography.
Robert Penn Warren
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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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...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
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 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.
Robert Penn Warren
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For whatever you live is life.
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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History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
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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The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
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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Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
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
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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.
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 from it.
Robert Penn Warren