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
technology animal suffering
A side benefit of the new and developing technologies is that soon we won't have to feel guilty about the suffering and denigration of the animals because we will have made them up.
animal thinking race
You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back.
believe eye animal
You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.
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.
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.
beyond love
There must be something beyond love. I want to get there.
dream thinking responsible
I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don't do anything with it, you lose it.
talking stranger enjoy
As you grow older, you'll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.
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.
enough can-do
Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.
beautiful horse blue
But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian Blue.
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.