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

- 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 …

- Joy Williams

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

- Joy Williams

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.

- 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 …

- Joy Williams

Someone once told me a story about long term relationships. To think of them as a continent to explore. I could spend a lifetime backpacking through …

- Joy Williams

I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don't do anything with it, you lose it.

- Joy Williams

Words at night were feral things.

- Joy Williams

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But thi…

- Joy Williams