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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
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Hutchinson
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Picture
Flow
Literature
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Life
Enhancement
Separate
More quotes by William Stafford
A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
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
There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
William Stafford
The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford
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
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
Language can do what it can’t say.
William Stafford
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
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
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
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
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
William Stafford
An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
William Stafford
Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
William Stafford
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
William Stafford
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
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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
It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
William Stafford