Walter Jon Williams quotes:

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

I've learned that I get blocked when my subconscious mind is telling me that I've taken the work in a wrong direction, and that once I start listening to what my subconscious is trying to tell me, I can work out the problem and get moving again.

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

I'm not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels, I'm afraid of what real human beings to do other real human beings.

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

When state and religion are one, religion becomes a means for the powerful to remain in power.

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

I've experienced writer's block, but never for more than a few days.

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

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

I can't speak for the other authors, but what I hoped to achieve was to illuminate certain corners of the Lucas universe that hadn't yet been explored.

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

Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If you can find collaborators whose strengths compliment your own, the result can be more than the sum of its authors.

An SF author who reads only SF will have little new to contribute, but someone with a broader experience will bring more to the table.

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.

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

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

Some of my ideas were shot down by Lucasfilm because they stepped on territory that has been reserved for the movies. I didn't have a problem with that.

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.