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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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Robert Penn Warren
Age: 84 †
Born: 1905
Born: April 24
Died: 1989
Died: September 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Guthrie
Kentucky
Really
Simply
Think
Saying
Thinking
Working
Given
Unsayable
Find
Steadily
Feel
Writers
Feels
Asking
Trying
Toward
More quotes by Robert Penn Warren
It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
Robert Penn Warren
The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
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
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
Robert Penn Warren
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
For whatever you live is life.
Robert Penn Warren
There was nothing particularly wrong with them they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.
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
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
What is man but his passion?
Robert Penn Warren
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
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
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
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
Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)
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
How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.
Robert Penn Warren
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Robert Penn Warren
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
Robert Penn Warren
