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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
Chooses
Choose
Story
Stories
More quotes by Robert Penn Warren
The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
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
What is man but his passion?
Robert Penn Warren
Tell me a story of deep delight.
Robert Penn Warren
Everything seems an echo of something else.
Robert Penn Warren
It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
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
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
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
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
Robert Penn Warren
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
Robert Penn Warren
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
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
Robert Penn Warren
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
Robert Penn Warren
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.
Robert Penn Warren
If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.
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
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
Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
Robert Penn Warren
