Quote

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

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
Find
Steadily
Feel
Writers
Feels
Asking
Trying
Toward
Really
Simply
Think
Saying
Thinking
Working
Given
Unsayable

More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

Image
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
Image
Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Tell me a story of deep delight.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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
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
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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
Image
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
Everything seems an echo of something else.
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 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
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
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
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
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
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
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