Robert Penn Warren Quotes

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

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.

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.

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

There ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain't built that way.

Then after a long time Annie wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen.

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.

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain.

The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.

I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.

I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of... What you don't know know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist... If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

For whatever you live is life.

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.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

I longed to know the world's name.

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.