186 Quotes by 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.

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.

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

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.

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.

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.

For whatever you live is life.

For the truth is a terrible thing.