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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I had a little epiphany when I was a writer at 'Chicago' magazine. I sat down to dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. Somebody poured a white dessert wine with chocolate cake. It was a wine I would never have expected to make sense. The idea of any wine tasting fabulous with chocolate cake was fascinating to me.
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To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.
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Humor can be an incredible lacerating and effective weapon. And that is the way I use it.
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Love each other in moderation. That is the key to long-lasting love. Too fast is as bad as too slow.
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My dad's an ex-policeman, and my mum is a sales representative, and they haven't got the acting bug. Bless them.
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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.
