Robert Penn Warren Quotes

I don`t expect you`ll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

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.

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

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

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

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

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.

This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from the other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principal.