Joy Williams
Joy Williams

Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place.

Joy Williams
Joy Williams

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.

Joy Williams
Joy Williams

One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you're just beginning to read and comprehend dies.

Joy Williams
Joy Williams

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.

Joy Williams
Joy Williams

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.

Joy Williams
Joy Williams

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.