Robert Penn Warren quotes

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic, renowned as the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. A central figure in 20th-century American literature, his works often explore themes of power, history, and morality. He is remembered as a founding member of the literary group the Fugitives and for his acclaimed novel "All the King’s Men." Here are 57 of his quotes:

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. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life.

Robert Penn Warren

What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography.

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

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Robert Penn Warren

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

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

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Robert Penn Warren

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.

Robert Penn Warren

The end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him.

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

I longed to know the world's name.

Robert Penn Warren

So little time we live in Time, And we learn all so painfully, That we may spare this hour's term To practice for Eternity.

Robert Penn Warren

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

Robert Penn Warren

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

Robert Penn Warren

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.

Robert Penn Warren

In separateness only does love learn definition.

Robert Penn Warren

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

If you could not accept the past and its burden, there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and [...] if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.

Robert Penn Warren

Tell me a story. In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances, and starlight. The name of the story will be Time, But you must not pronounce its name. Tell me a story of deep delight.

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.

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