Joy Williams Quotes

Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly.

A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

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.

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.

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 that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

Words at night were feral things.

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

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 and significance, deep significance.

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.

A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough.

Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place.

Many writers today are wanderers. There is not only an unhousedness in language - how to convey, to say nothing of converge - but an unhousedness of place.

I believe in guilt. There's not enough guilt around these days for my taste.

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 reader's face.

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 enough

As you grow older, you'll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.

Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.

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 the animals because we will have made them up.

One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you're just beginning to read and comprehend dies.

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.

I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don't do anything with it, you lose it.

Imagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop.

That's nice, isn't it?" Edith said. "That little kid is so trusting it's kind of holy, but if his trust were misplaced it would really be holy.