Robert Penn Warren Quotes

I think to the degree writers are serious, there is a greater tendency for them to write to themselves, because they're trying to compose their own thoughts. They are trying to find out what is in their minds, which is the great mystery. Finding out who you are, what is in your head, and what kind of companion you are to yourself in the course of life. I do think people have very profound lives of which they say virtually nothing.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

I write to discover what I think.

Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

Everything I write is about me.

In my book, I was trying to get into my own soul.

I feel like I've grown up a bit. I'm a bit more confident, and I've been reading more, and I've had a little more time to myself. I went on this writing trip to gather my thoughts about where and who I am in this world, and why we're all here.

One of the things that I've come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is that I'm talking about myself.

It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.

The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way. You get a chance to know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a relationship with your mind.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think.

If you want to know what you look like, look into a mirror. If you want to know how you think, you should write

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity.

If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these aphorisms as affect you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you; and then show your copy to whom you please.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

After all, all knowledge simply means self-knowledge.

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night.

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

I write to find out what I think.

think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.

I write to find out what I'm talking about.

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.