Top 35 Walter Jon Williams Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

6. “If you wish to find the unclouded truth, he told himself, do not concern yourself with right or wrong. Conflicts with right and wrong are a sickness of the mind. The.”

— Walter Jon Williams

7. “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.”

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

10. “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.”

— Walter Jon Williams

11. “It’s a tough job to tell a story when the audience already knows the ending, and the ending is bleak.”

— Walter Jon Williams

12. “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.”

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

14. “I’ve experienced writer’s block, but never for more than a few days.”

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

16. “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.”

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

20. “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.”

— Walter Jon Williams

21. “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.”

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

23. “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.”

— Walter Jon Williams

24. “If only the heart’s advice were infallible.”

— Walter Jon Williams

25. “I went to college, though I didn’t take many writing courses.”

— Walter Jon Williams

26. “It is late afternoon. The world has paused to catch its breath, and the ice-cream streets melt slowly in the sun. The people of Pennsylvania wait in the hush for the twilight that will soften the tempered Gerber edges of their world.”

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

28. “Earth, the startlingly pure blue and white, the brown and silver snakes that are rivers filled with erosion, the fragmented coastlines where the rising seas are eating the land, just as Earth’s remaining resources are being eaten by the population. Soon the population may be the only resource left. The Orbitals were once their hope, a gateway to new resources. Now the Orbitals stand like a wall between Earth and its broken dreams, claiming the future for their own. Reno.”

— Walter Jon Williams

29. “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.”

— Walter Jon Williams

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

— Walter Jon Williams

31. “I was pretty much grown-up by the time I attended school in Britain – or as grown-up as I’ll ever get.”

— Walter Jon Williams

32. “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.”

— Walter Jon Williams

33. “I have no sword, Steward thought, and the thought was triumphant. From the state which is above and beyond, from thought I make my sword.”

— Walter Jon Williams

34. “SuTopo was less a person than a presence, a calm source of authority, like a reigning monarch. Aside.”

— Walter Jon Williams

35. “Curzon stood up. He gestured with a fist. “I don’t want you to think about anything,” he said. “I want you to feel. Feel the rightness of this. The correctness of this vision. The necessity of it.” Steward could see patches of sweat under Curzon’s arms. “I want you to sense, Steward, that this is something worth having.”

— Walter Jon Williams

36. “Thin streams of blood ran in artistic patterns. “Pulling toenails serves the Destinarian philosophy?” he asked. Ardala shrugged. “Demonstrates the fragility of flesh as opposed to hardware. I’m going to take a bath.”

— Walter Jon Williams

37. “Moving like a rat in its maze. Programmed. Performing a function that it was not capable of understanding, on behalf of people whose entire existence was outside its knowledge, detected only as feet occasionally planted in its way.”

— Walter Jon Williams