Joy Williams Quotes

I think that we can learn so much if we pay attention to our dreams, whether when we are asleep or in waking dreams. There are connections that are absolutely incredible.

In order to have that incredible groove that makes you dream you have to think not of the groove, but of the dream.

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?

My pictures are always part of my thinking, and my emotions, tensions, dreams, desires.

I dream in color.

The theoretician believes in logic and believes that he despises dreams, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him.... He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them.

I wake up from dreams and go, 'Wow, put this down on paper'. The whole thing is strange. You hear the words, everything is right there in front of your face.

I wake up with new dreams every day...more I can do to channel that into things that I love to create is healthier for me and probably for everybody around me.

Oft in dreams invention we bestow to change a flounce or add a furbelow.

Magic has often been thought of us the art of making dreams come true; the art of realizing visions. Yet before we can bring birth to the vision we have to see it.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

I think creativity becomes really beautiful and magical when you allow it to do what it's needing you to do.

The intellect is not the means of creation, and creation does not take place through the functioning of the intellect; on the contrary, there is creation when the intellect is silent.

The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.

Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly’s wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they must not think too much - thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile's viewpoint.

You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams.

The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.

Sometimes the best ideas I have are in my bathtub or in my bed or in my dreams early in the morning before waking up ... I'm like a TV antennae, I catch it all and do it my way.

I always see these landscapes in my dreams, and feel happy. I desperately try to transform these dreams into artwork, so that even while napping, I construct and reconstruct various images.

A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.

If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

Once, I was a poet, and, like all poets, I spent too long in the Kingdom of Dreams.

The thing about California is that it's kind of a dream, and I started to feel like I was living in a dream. I still feel like that. Because of that I think I've been able to realize a lot of things that were just ideas. When I was living in New York City, it's such a rat race, it's so competitive and everything is so concrete and in your face all the time. If you're like, "I'm gonna be a writer!" Everybody's like, "Yeah, you and all the other assholes on the subway." There isn't a lot of space for the detached, free-floating movement of the imagination.