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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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
Flow
Literature
Experience
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Life
Enhancement
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Picture
More quotes by William Stafford
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
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
William Stafford
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
William Stafford
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now?
William Stafford
One way to find your place is like the rain, a million requests for lodging, one that wins, finds your cheek: you find your home.
William Stafford
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
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.
William Stafford
'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
William Stafford
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
William Stafford
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
There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
William Stafford
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
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
I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
William Stafford
People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford
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
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
William Stafford
It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
William Stafford
Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
