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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

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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Really
Difference
Make
Differences
Good
Doesn
Inhibit
Happens
Assessment
Today
Shouldn
Done
Product
Writing
Standards
Something
Products

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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.
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When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
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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.
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Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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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.
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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
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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.
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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