Quote

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

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
Idea
History
Ideas
Matter
Image
Blood
American

More quotes by 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
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
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
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
Image
Tell me a story of deep delight.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
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
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
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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
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
Image
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
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
I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
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
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
Image
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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.
Robert Penn Warren