186 Quotes by Robert Penn Warren

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

It is a human defect--to try to know one's self by the self of another.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

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

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?