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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
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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
First
Done
Writing
Kind
Always
Places
Things
Pain
Firsts
Without
More quotes by 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?
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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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If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.
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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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Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
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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
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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If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.
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What is man but his passion?
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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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For whatever you live is life.
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The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
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The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
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It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
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The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
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You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
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More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
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...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
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History is all explained by geography.
Robert Penn Warren
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
