Literary Birthday – 11 February – Joy Williams
Happy Birthday, Joy Williams, born 11 February 1944.
Joy Williams Quotes
- Language accepts the writer as its host, it feeds off the writer, it makes him a husk. There is something uncanny about good writing — uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks.
- The good piece of writing startles the reader back into Life.
- Whenever the writer writes, it’s always three o’clock in the morning, it’s always three or four or five o’clock in the morning in his head. Those horrid hours are the writer’s days and nights when he is writing.
- Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.
- 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…. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.
- Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.
Source for writing quotes: Brainpickings
Read: Joy Williams’ 8 Essential Attributes Of The Short Story
Joy Williams is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Her five novels include The Quick and the Dead
and State of Grace
. Her six short story collections include Concerning the Future of Souls and The Pelican Child. Her 2001 essay collection, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, a Rea Award for the Short Story, a Kirkus Award for Fiction, a Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2008, she was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has taught creative writing at institutions across the country, including the University of Iowa and the University of Wyoming.
Source for image: Goodreads
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