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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
Fiction
Purged
Writing
Distractions
Life
Presents
Distraction
Confusion
Accidents
Image
Ordinary
Confusions

More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

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The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
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You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
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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.
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History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
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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.
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Everything seems an echo of something else.
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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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It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
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More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
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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)
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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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For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
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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.
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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.
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The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
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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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There was nothing particularly wrong with them they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.
Robert Penn Warren
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Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
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.
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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