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"My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that could have been set anywhere. A lot of the poems were just exercises for myself."
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"You gotta make it a priority to make your priorities a priority."
"You can't excel in everything but you can be exceptional in a few things, so why not choose your life's focus?"
"Nothing worthwhile ever came from divided attention."
"Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus."
"In all well-organised brains, the predominating idea-and there always is one-is sure to be the last thought before sleeping, and the first upon waking in the morning. Andrea had scarcely opened his eyes when his predominating idea presented itself, and whispered in his ear that he had slept too long."
"If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus you must not be thinking about yourself and equally you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing."
"To develop stronger focus, develop a greater reason or meaning for your goal."
Explore more quotes by James Welch
"In a lot of Indian societies, spirituality has been lost, I think it's still the best way of looking at the world for Indians - better than any organized religion in this country."
"The townspeople outside the reservations had a very superior attitude toward Indians, which was kind of funny, because they weren't very wealthy; they were on the fringes of society themselves."
"Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana."
"I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians."
"The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue."
"I wander around, get the lay of the land and try to imagine what kind of people would have lived there in that historical period. What would they eat? What kind of clothing would they wear? How did they shelter themselves? How did they get around?"
"The economic piece is still missing, since it's so hard to attract industry to reservations, but spiritually and educationally, they're doing just fine. Each tribe has a community college now, and they teach the language, they teach the traditions."
"I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal."
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