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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.

Joy Williams

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Joy Williams
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Orange
California
Born
Puzzled
Place
Pole
Seems
Cave
Firsts
Caves
First
Writers
Like
Seem
Went
Natural

More quotes by Joy Williams

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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.
Joy Williams
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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.
Joy Williams
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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.
Joy Williams
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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 wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.
Joy Williams
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A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.
Joy Williams
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Did the walls of the barn start to tremble With a glory they could not contain? Did anyone wake with the feeling Of peace that they could not explain? Oh the love must have been overwhelming As it warmed everyone in it's flow For all of the earth is still telling of 2000 Decembers ago.
Joy Williams
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Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly.
Joy Williams
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Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.
Joy Williams
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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 control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.
Joy Williams
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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
Joy Williams
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One writes to find words' meanings.
Joy Williams
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Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.
Joy Williams
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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.
Joy Williams
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As you grow older, you'll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.
Joy Williams
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You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.
Joy Williams
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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.
Joy Williams
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It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.
Joy Williams
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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.
Joy Williams
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I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don't do anything with it, you lose it.
Joy Williams