Quote

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

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
Doesn
Inhibit
Good
Happens
Assessment
Today
Shouldn
Done
Product
Writing
Standards
Products
Something
Difference
Really
Differences
Make

More quotes by William Stafford

Image
The earth says have a place, be what that place requires hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other.
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
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
William Stafford
Image
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
Image
People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford
Image
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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
When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
William Stafford
Image
If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
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
So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
William Stafford
Image
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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
...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
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
Image
Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
Image
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford
Image
It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
William Stafford
Image
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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