Robert Penn Warren

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

"If you could not accept the past and its burden, there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the pas…"

"I longed to know the world's name."

"But to poetry — You have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It's more of a prayerful…"

"In separateness only does love learn definition."

"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."

"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."

"A young man’s ambition — to get along in the world and make a place for himself — half your life goes that way, till you’re 45 or 50. Then, if you’re lucky, you make terms with life, you get released."