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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When somebody asks what I do, I guess I say 'writer' first.
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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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It is axiomatic among writers that no one ever sues the writer of an unsuccessful book. Just let a book go over twenty-five thousand copies and it is surprising how many people's feelings are hurt, how many screwballs think their brain children have been stolen, and how many people feel that they have been portrayed in a manner calculated to bring infamy upon them.
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Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.
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There were schools and hospitals who were ready to take people with undescribed injuries, but not necessarily ready to take people with severe radiation poisoning.
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Why would you want a picture with a wee, chubby guy from Bathgate? I just don't understand my appeal.
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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.
