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 am not an autobiographical 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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I'm hesitant to ever take on the crest of the veteran. So I don't know who I am to warn the younger writer about the perils to come. I think maybe the most dangerous influence is to think you have all the answers and should be giving counsel.
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To be an artist, you're basically a crazy person. You're extremely narcissistic and emotionally expressive. The idea that the world needs to listen to you is an insane thought.
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If you don't know what color to take, take black.
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As far as people whose style interests me, I'd say Grace Kelly, Gwen, Spice Girls, Victoria Beckham, and that nanny called Fran.
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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.
