Quote

Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?

William Stafford

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Persons
Kept
Person
Poet
Real
Question
Work
Stop
Way
Sound
Delighting
People
Words
Discovering
Everyone
Starts
Born
Caring

More quotes by William Stafford

Image
Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.
William Stafford
Image
Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.
William Stafford
Image
I don't see writing as a communication of something already discovered, as truths already known. Rather, I see writing as a job of experiment. It's like any discovery job you don't know what's going to happen until you try it.
William Stafford
Image
My question is when did other people give up the idea of being a poet? You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
William Stafford
Image
I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
William Stafford
Image
A student comes to me with a piece of writing, holds it out, says, 'Is this good?' A whole sequence of emergencies goes off in my mind. That's not a question to ask anyone but yourself.
William Stafford
Image
There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
William Stafford
Image
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
William Stafford
Image
'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
William Stafford
Image
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
William Stafford
Image
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford
Image
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
Image
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
William Stafford
Image
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
Image
People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford
Image
Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
William Stafford
Image
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
Image
Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
Image
If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
William Stafford
Image
A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.
William Stafford