Joy Williams Quotes

There's always hunger to create because I believe that's what I do. I believe that's what I'm supposed to be doing.

My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.

Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.

Look, Salvador Dali did not paint because he needed the money. No conversation about materialism and music makes sense. You make music and that's that, it doesn't matter why.

I made the flames lick the surface of the painting in such a way that is recorded the spontaneous traces of the fire. But what is it that provokes in me this pursuit of the impression of fire? Why must I search for its traces?

It's like a pulsar inside me. There is this great burst of energy, forcing me to write, and then the star goes quiet for a time, and I think it's gone, but it's gathering energy for another burst. And I seem to be almost unwilling participants in this.

I cannot say why I wanted to paint. The only answer is in the pictures themselves.

Instead of taking a year off, I started 'Dreamers of the Day' exactly 36 hours after I sent the manuscript for 'A Thread of Grace' to the publisher!

You don't make a film because the audience is ready for it. You make a film because you have questions that are in your gut.

I try to look at the whole thing and say 'yes' to the projects that I cannot stop thinking about. If I read a script and the subject stays with me - then that's when I want to go to work.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Creativity runs on automatic, no matter what's happening in other parts of my life. I can't help myself. It's been in me, and it evolves in me over the years. It's a condition in me.

An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine.

I never, ever decided that I had to write a novel because, to me, there's no such decision that ought to be made. It's only something that I felt compelled to do, and it began to evolve.

I love cinema and creating new things, but essentially, I am creating all this because I want people to see it.

As an artist, I often wonder what my purpose is or why I do what I do.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.

The only reason to write is from love.

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.

I tend to write first thing, and then do my drawing later. I like to draw at night. But often I go for long stretches without drawing, because I'm trying to figure out what I'm writing.

In the same way, I can wake up with a very positive idea of what I want to do for my collection, and be completely desperate at night regarding the same thing. And I do a lot of other things too: Writing for me is almost as important as drawing my collection.