Joy Williams Quotes

25 quotes in 392 categories

• One writes to find words' meanings.
• There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat…
• You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.
• Words at night were feral things.
• Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.
• You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as…
• Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the…
• You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long…
• The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the…
• Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.
• But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian Blue.
• I think I had the same notion most people have, which is it’s simply a town that percolates around country music. Though country-music history is…
• A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.
• 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 ever…
• The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.
• As you grow older, you'll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.
• 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.…
• Writers when they're writing live in a spooky, clamorous silence, a state somewhat like the advanced stages of prayer but without prayer's calming benefits.
• 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, but…
• One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you're just beginning to read and comprehend dies.

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