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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.

William Stafford

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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Thing
Block
Lows
Standards
Writers
Whose
Writer
Enough

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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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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?
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You shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it.
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Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
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An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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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.
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I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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The more you let yourself be distracted from where you are going, the more you are the person that you are. It's not so much like getting lost as it is like getting found.
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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
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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.
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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
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The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.
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