Walter Jon Williams
Walter Jon Williams
Walter Jon Williamsis an American writer, primarily of science fiction. Previously he wrote nautical adventure fiction under the name Jon Williams, a series of historical novels set during the age of sail, Privateers and Gentlemen...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth15 October 1953
CountryUnited States of America
Walter Jon Williams quotes about
writing elements want
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.
battle drawn influenced
The big battle at the end of DW isn't drawn from history, but it's influenced by history, certainly.
american-celebrity
I wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember.
advertising
The Internet offers an interesting combination of advertising and community by participating in the community you can become an advertisement for yourself.
sf
For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone.
decided freedom hard offered sf
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.
reading technology favors
I'm in favor of any technology that makes my work available to the reading public at a reasonable price.
book writing long
How long it takes to write a book depends on its length.
intelligent college people
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.
choices irresistible compulsion
Being a writer was never a choice, it was an irresistible compulsion.
tables littles
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.
labels helping genre
Genre labels are useful only insofar as they help you find an audience.
character years law
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.
interesting community advertising
The Internet offers an interesting combination of advertising and community - by participating in the community you can become an advertisement for yourself.