Quote

You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.

Robert Penn Warren

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Penn Warren
Age: 84 †
Born: 1905
Born: April 24
Died: 1989
Died: September 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Guthrie
Kentucky
Chooses
Choose
Story
Stories

More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

Image
Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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
Image
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.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
What is man but his passion?
Robert Penn Warren
Image
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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
Image
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
Image
History is all explained by geography.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
Tell me a story of deep delight.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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
Image
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.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
There was nothing particularly wrong with them they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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
Image
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