Quote

Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.

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
Artists
Journal
Results
Immediate
Peace
Judged
Artist
Assume
Keep
Assuming
Anything
Accomplish
Work
Worthy
Long
Workers
Haul

More quotes by William Stafford

Image
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford
Image
People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford
Image
Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
William Stafford
Image
You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford
Image
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
Image
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
William Stafford
Image
I heard a bird congratulating itself all day for being a jay. Nobody cared. But it was glad all over again, and said so, again.
William Stafford
Image
Security of character would be like a compass, you know? Other people may say that this way is north, or this way might be north. But the compass just says -- north. That's what we count on.
William Stafford
Image
'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
William Stafford
Image
And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
William Stafford
Image
When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
William Stafford
Image
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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
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
Image
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
William Stafford
Image
...What you fear will not go away it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.
William Stafford
Image
A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
Image
It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
William Stafford
Image
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
William Stafford
Image
It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation. . . . Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you--you come at it over unmarked snow.
William Stafford