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

More quotes by William Stafford

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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford
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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing. And things you know before you hear them — those are you, those are why you are in the world.
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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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
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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford
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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
William Stafford
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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
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It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
William Stafford
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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
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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
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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.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford