What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibi lity of time, the dark… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
“We are saved not because we are worthy. We are saved because we are loved.” — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
A side benefit of the new and developing technologies is that soon we won't have to feel guilty about the suffering and denigration of… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
“Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
“For centuries poets, some poets, have tried to give a voice to the animals, and readers, some readers, have felt empathy and sorrow. If… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
“Down in the kitchen, I open the refrigerator. There is nothing there but the prize steer of the county fair, rearranged in neat and… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings.… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others,… — Joy Williams Copy Share Image
