William Stafford Quotes

People called me Cilla when I was little because I was always singing and writing poems.

I don't understand how people live without creating.

I was very dramatic as a kid. I loved to entertain. I was taking my bathing suits and painting them black and putting sparkles on them because I thought I was going to be on stage.

I think doing something creative is the most important thing to me, and I think it's probably just good for the soul for anyone, whatever it is. You don't have to be a film director - you can do gardening or something - but I think everyone needs to create something.

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

All children have creative power.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

I think of myself as a little kid, and I had a wild imagination, but it was something that was encouraged and supported, which helped steer me into the arts.

Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.

I think the way kids create is so inspiring. They're drawing a picture? They love the picture they drew; they're not tortured about it.

Every kid has a story to tell!

Everybody has ideas. The vital question is, what do you do with them? My rock musician sons shape their ideas into music. My sister takes her ideas and fashions them into poems. My brother uses his ideas to help him understand science. I take my ideas and turn them into stories.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

Art is not in some far-off place. A work of art is the expression of a man's whole personality, sensibility and ability.

If I were to have a dream job, it would probably be a poet. Then again, I don't think I'm a very good poet!

I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.

The music is the shining path over which the poet travels to bring his song to the world.

No matter how old you get, if you can keep the desire to be creative, you're keeping the man-child alive.

I wrote my first song when I was six or seven, a silly little song. But I used to write poems in high school - not songs.

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.