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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
Poetry
Becomes
Itching
Write
Itch
Enough
Scratch
Writing
Scratches
Like
Urge
Urges
Annoying
More quotes by Robert Penn Warren
...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
Robert Penn Warren
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
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History is all explained by geography.
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
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
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
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Robert Penn Warren
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
It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
Robert Penn Warren
What is man but his passion?
Robert Penn Warren
The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary 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.
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Tell me a story of deep delight.
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Everything seems an echo of something else.
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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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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
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
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
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
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
