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

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
Stories
Chooses
Choose
Story

More quotes by 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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History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
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.
Robert Penn Warren
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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
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For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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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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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
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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?
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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For whatever you live is life.
Robert Penn Warren
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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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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
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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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
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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Everything seems an echo of something else.
Robert Penn Warren
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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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...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
Robert Penn Warren
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Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
Robert Penn Warren