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

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
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
Image
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
Image
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
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
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
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
Image
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
Image
I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
William Stafford
Image
You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.
William Stafford
Image
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
Image
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.
William Stafford
Image
I embrace emerging experience, I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.
William Stafford
Image
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford
Image
Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
William Stafford
Image
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
William Stafford
Image
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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
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
It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
William Stafford