Walter Jon Williams Quotes

I've built a network that curates interestingness. In my universe, it encompasses thousands and thousands of filters and people, each person being a filter. So it's kinda cool. Like I've created my own utopia, removing the boring stuff and showing only the amazing stuff.

The wisdom of the crowds has peaked. Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0 - the wisdom of the crowds - and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.

While the scale of our library is certainly attractive to our users, equally important is the quality of the content we provide and our state-of-the-art processing operation that vets every single piece of content that's submitted to ensure only the most suitable content is included.

Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

All I can do is put out the good stuff, and people will make the decision on whether they like it. My fans are very intelligent people. They're not stupid. They know what's good.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

If you put up a blog, people can cut out the middle man and get material to you. Which is really helpful because a lot of time there's really cool stuff out there that we just don't see. Because, y'know, the agent is acting in our best interest, but it does sometimes prevent some of the good stuff from getting through.

Writers would submit scripts to me, and if I liked one well enough to submit to magazine editors, I had the know-how whether the story was good or bad.

Publishers vet books, and they do a good job keeping out the low quality. But they also miss some good quality.

A lot of authors, judging by their list, will put anything out that they finish... That's the worst model I've heard of in my life. It's just idiotic. Why wouldn't you just wait for the good ones?

The thing with newspapers is that they are a filter. We're relying on the editors of that paper to be a filter and to tell you that this is worth reading about, this is quality, and this is quite reliable.

I think the curation consternation is this: Just because you like something or list something, are you really curating?

For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

A handful of us determine what will be on the evening news broadcasts, or, for that matter, in the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Indeed it is a handful of us with this awesome power.And those [news stories] available to us already have been culled and re-culled by persons far outside our control.

All sorts of factors contribute to what Facebook or Twitter present in a feed, or what Google or Bing show us in search results. Our expectation is that those intermediaries will provide open conduits to others' content and that the variables in their processes just help yield the information we find most relevant.

When you work for Bruckheimer, you don't get it any better. He's the ultimate producer. I've had the good fortune of working with some great producers over the years.

The area we define as what Quora's good at is long-form text that's useful over time, and where you care about who wrote the text. Not that you need to be friends with them, just that they're someone trustworthy.

I'm pretty quick to delete something off of my phone if it's become obsolete. And things like RSS readers have made life easier - all of the headlines are going to be related to a topic I'm interested in.

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.

Let us believe neither half of the good people tell us of ourselves, nor half the evil they say of others.

You read a million scripts during pilot season, and most of them are not very good, so the good ones really shine.

What I have learned from my work up to now, is to try to be open, but also protect myself by not letting the good and the evil get too much importance.

There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.

You have to go where the good writing is.

We are in a culture where it's so easy to just turn things off that you don't like. And I think that doesn't make you a well-rounded person or artist. You have to be able to take the good with the bad and have opinions on things!