Walter Jon Williams

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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