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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There is no writer's block in a newsroom. There's only unemployment block.
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I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, 'No. No, I'm finished. Bye.' And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won't do that.
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A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame.
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One has the responsibility to oneself, to the writer, director and the people who put up the money, to put out the best of what one has experienced and understood about the human condition as it relates to the role one has been hired to portray.
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I don't read a lot of magazines, but when I'm traveling, I'll pick up a copy of 'Vanity Fair' to read on the plane - it's like a full meal! The articles are so good, especially the crime stories. Browsing the Web is more like snacking - but I live on snacks.
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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.
