Joy Williams Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
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I've basically worked as a journalist and a writer.
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I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do as a money-making job.
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I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.
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A writer has to live with a sense of honor.
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It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
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I was just as voracious a writer as I was a reader.
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Every writer uses his own way to motivate oneself.
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When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.
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I've never experienced writer's block. When it's going really well, my body temperature goes up, and I'm flushed. I get quite delirious.
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There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.
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I'm not a great writer.
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If you are a good writer - and I think I am - you are able to handle any kind of group and imagine their lives.
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I didn't know how to be a writer. But I thought, 'I can do this.'
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I'm a very conceptual writer.
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I don't go around thinking about regret; regret doesn't consume me as a person... I'm not certain about whether any writer, any artist, any musician, can write without regret, so I don't think perhaps it's even particularly Southern.
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My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.
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There is no writer's block in a newsroom. There's only unemployment block.
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Like so many children who read a lot, I begin to declare rather early that I want to be a writer. But this is the only way I have of articulating a different desire, a desire that I can’t yet understand. What I really want is to be transported into a space in which everything is as distinct, complete, and intelligible as in the stories I read. And, like most children, I’m a literalist through and through. I want reality to imitate books – and books to capture the essence of reality. I love words insofar as they correspond to the world, insofar as they give it to me in a heightened form. The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become – and such lucidity is a form of joy. Sometimes, when I find a new expression, I roll it on the tongue, as if shaping it in my mouth gave birth to a new shape in the world. Nothing fully exists until it is articulated.
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Politics is - once in a while - a forum for serious debate about political philosophy.
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Binge viewing has been around since DVD box sets.
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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.
