Joy Williams
Joy Williams
Joy Williamsis an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 February 1944
CountryUnited States of America
prayer writing silence
Writers when they're writing live in a spooky, clamorous silence, a state somewhat like the advanced stages of prayer but without prayer's calming benefits.
grateful writing shadow
Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough
writing faces comfort
Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.
writing wings reader
The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.
writing
One writes to find words' meanings.
writing process writing-process
There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.
writing grace doe
Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.
writing care these-days
It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.
beautiful morning writing
The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.
writing dark light
A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.
almost bark crashing deck dim fading gaps gotten grey heard lay leaving moving pink save sky time toward trees wild woods
The woods were wild at nightfall. She heard dim crashing and splashes and the bark of a dog, and through the gaps in the trees was a mottled sky of fading pink and grey discs, microbes moving toward the west. She had almost gotten away but not in time and now leaving wouldn't save her. She lay down on the deck with the woods all around her.
home material
Everything is gone. And it's not so much the material things. It's just ... that's home.
converge
Many writers today are wanderers. There is not only an unhousedness in language - how to convey, to say nothing of converge - but an unhousedness of place.
beyond love
There must be something beyond love. I want to get there.