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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.
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
Real
Idealist
Anyway
Goes
Around
Doe
Matter
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?
Robert Penn Warren
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
Robert Penn Warren
Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
Robert Penn Warren
You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
Robert Penn Warren
...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
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
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Penn Warren
There was nothing particularly wrong with them they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.
Robert Penn Warren
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
I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
Robert Penn Warren
History is all explained by geography.
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
For whatever you live is 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
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
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
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
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
