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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
Annoying
Poetry
Becomes
Itching
Write
Itch
Enough
Scratch
Writing
Scratches
Like
Urge
Urges
More quotes by 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.
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For whatever you live is life.
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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.
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There was nothing particularly wrong with them they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.
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Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
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History is all explained by geography.
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How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
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The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
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Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
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The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
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If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.
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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.
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What is man but his passion?
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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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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.
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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.
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History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
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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.
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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?
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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
