Robert Penn Warren

“What is man but his passion?”

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

“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)”

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

“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.”

“Beauty Is the fume-track of necessity. This thought Is therapeutic. If, after several Applications, you do not find Relief, consult your family physician”

“For what blessing may a man hope for but An immortality in The loving vigilance of death.”

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

“I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the k...”

“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...”

“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...”

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