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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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Robert Penn Warren
Age: 84 †
Born: 1905
Born: April 24
Died: 1989
Died: September 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Guthrie
Kentucky
Writing
Scratches
Like
Urge
Urges
Annoying
Poetry
Becomes
Itching
Write
Itch
Enough
Scratch
More quotes by Robert Penn Warren
...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
Robert Penn Warren
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
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Robert Penn Warren
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
If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.
Robert Penn Warren
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
Robert Penn Warren
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
Robert Penn Warren
For whatever you live is life.
Robert Penn Warren
My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don't have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.
Robert Penn Warren
Tell me a story of deep delight.
Robert Penn Warren
What is man but his passion?
Robert Penn Warren
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
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
Robert Penn Warren
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
The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
Robert Penn Warren
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
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
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)
Robert Penn Warren
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
