Walter Jon Williams Quotes

Terror skittered around the fringes of his consciousness on fast rodent feet.

I now have to find a reason to write, every single day.

I found college useful for a lot of other reasons. It exposed me to a great many influences I wouldn't otherwise have encountered, and gave me a lot of time with some very intelligent people whose thoughts are still with me.

Genre labels are useful only insofar as they help you find an audience.

It's a tough job to tell a story when the audience already knows the ending, and the ending is bleak.

Now I have to motivate myself much more than I had previously.

Gabriel flashed him the one-fingered Mudra of Contempt.

He put the point of the knife against what he thought was the cricothyroid membrane, steadied it with the right hand, then slammed the butt with his left palm.

Pain shrieked through him as the knife went in. Blood spurted over his hands. He hoped he hadn't hit the carotid artery--local variation in the throat was considerable, and blood vessels were tricky.

He still couldn't breath. Panic flailed in him and he slapped the butt of the knife again, as hard as he could.

He felt the point strike the back of his throat, gagged, felt more pain. He took a grip on the grainy plastic handle of the knife and twisted, felt cartilage grind as he forced it apart--

--and he breathed. Blood spattered as the long, full breath whistled out. He gurgled as he breathed in.

[...]

When he felt ready he got to his feet. He found a fork and jabbed the tines into his incision, then twisted to keep it open. His lungs kept going into spasm in an attempt to cough the obstruction out.

I can't help but wonder how the old Empire would have handled the crisis. I hope you will forgive my partisan attitude but it seems to me that the Emperor would have mobilized his entire armament at the first threat and dealt with the Yuuzhan Vong in an efficient and expeditious manner through the use of overwhelming force. Certainly better than Borsk Fey'lya's policy if I understood it correctly as a policy of negotiating with the invaders at the same time as he was fighting them sending signals of weakness to a ruthless enemy who used negotiation only as a cover for further conquests."

"That's not what the Empire would have done Commander. What the Empire would have done was build a super-colossal Yuuzhan Vong-killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened It wouldn't have worked. They'd forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors or some other mistake and a hotshot enemy pilot would have dropped a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that's what the Empire would have done."

Dorja Han

If the Force is life and the Yuuzhan Vong are alive and you cannot see them in the Force then is the problem with the Yuuzhan Vong or is it with your perceptions

Vergere to Luke

The Internet offers an interesting combination of advertising and community by participating in the community you can become an advertisement for yourself.

That's why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.

It's hard to generalize, because they're all different. When I started, I decided to take as much advantage as I could of the freedom offered by the SF field.

The big battle at the end of DW isn't drawn from history, but it's influenced by history, certainly.

I went to college, though I didn't take many writing courses.

May I ask what role you envision for the Jedi in this war
Two words Skywalker. None whatsoever.

Luke Rodan

Try to meet as many authors, agents, and editors as you can.

Working within the limitations of the shared world generally made the writing easier, because I didn't have to invent any of the characters or background, which is usually the hardest part.

I'm in favor of any technology that makes my work available to the reading public at a reasonable price.

Until you actually join this government you say that you defend and join it on the same basis as any other citizen then I have every intention of regarding you as I would any other lobbyist for any other interest group demanding special privileges for its members.

Fyor Rodan

I have a Jedi Council to put together. I thought you might help me.
We get to spend the day gossiping about our colleagues and calling it work I'm willing.

Luke Mara

The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.

The evil god wants to force humanity into the path he's chosen. But if I was certain of the best path - " and here he smiled, " - I wouldn't force anyone. That would be a waste of energy. I'd merely try to make the thing inevitable.

I want a platform that, like a book or a magazine, I can carry into the bath or leave at the beach.

Being a writer was never a choice, it was an irresistible compulsion.

Why do I feel that ghosts are more real
Than these creatures of substance and matter?
Why does their song seem to drive me along
More than humanity's drivel and pratter?

When all else fails fall back on the truth.
No I'm a politician I can't tell the truth

Mara Cal Omas

I wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember.

Right up till the 1980s, SF envisioned giant mainframe computers that ran everything remotely, that ingested huge amounts of information and regurgitated it in startling ways, and that behaved (or were programmed to behave) very much like human beings ... Now we have 14-year-olds with more computing power on their desktops than existed in the entire world in 1960. But computers in fiction are still behaving in much the same way as they did in the Sixties. That's because in fiction [artificial intelligence] has to follow the laws of dramatic logic, just like human characters.

TV stars are cool. Even if their characters are less than admirable, they come across as somehow sympathetic, maybe even neighborly. They are, after all, people you invite into your home every week. If you don't like them, you won't watch them.

Movie stars, by contrast, are hot. They have to blaze so fiercely that they fill a screen forty feet high and demand the attention of a crowded theater.

That's why very few TV stars have graduated successfully to features. It requires not only different skills but a different personality. You have to go from amiable to commanding.

Likewise, some movie stars are simply too big for television. Jack Nicholson is riveting on-screen, but you wouldn't want him in your living room week after week. The television simply couldn't contain his personality.

I was pretty much grown-up by the time I attended school in Britain - or as grown-up as I'll ever get.

Everything that you read is an influence on everything you write, and you want to draw as many elements into your work as you can.

How long it takes to write a book depends on its length.

The mass-market paperback, for one, is too expensive.

For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone.