Robert Penn Warren Quotes

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

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)

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.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

Beauty
Is the fume-track of necessity. This thought
Is therapeutic.

If, after several
Applications, you do not find
Relief, consult your family physician

And the testicles of the fathers hang down like old lace

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.

you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

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

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

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.

If you want him to do it, you've got to change the picture of the world inside his head.