Walter Jon Williams Quotes

Thirteen years I took on this last book.

It took me longer to write the book on Lincoln than it took to fight the Civil War.

'John Henry Days' was already half in the can before my first book came out, so I'd already started something that was big and sprawling - I just had to finish it.

A book is not a short-term project. It's essentially your baby, so it takes a lot of work.

I won't write a book. I haven't got a magnum opus in me.

I have a lot of respect for people who write a whole book because I've heard it will kill you.

I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it.

In 1957, I decided: write or perish.

Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.

I can't even say I've begun yet, but I'm trying on the idea that there is a book in my future.

I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

I therefore set to work, and after two and a half years of not inconsiderable labour I now have the privilege and the satisfaction of accompanying the early volumes of the series with this preface.

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun.

It took me ten years and seven books to bag an agent - it took me that long to start writing good.

I started writing 'The Lord of Opium' in 2008 and produced about 80 pages before disaster struck. Three eye operations nearly put an end to my career.

Perfection is an unattainable goal. It isn't going to be perfect. Just get words down on paper, and when you stumble to what you think is the end of the book, you will have hundreds of pages of words that came out of your head. It may not be perfect, but it looks like a book.

Writing a book is such a full-time job. If you're away for a few days, you have to start again.

I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

I was swimming in my swimming pool when 'The Secret Lovers' popped entire into my head. I got out, dried off, went upstairs, and finished the book in about 50 days.

'Baker Towers' is the book I've always known I would write, but it wasn't an easy book to do.

I really absolutely loved writing my first book.

I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.

I mean, the wonderful thing about writing a book is that you're getting a finished product at the end of the day. You're communicating directly with the reader.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

The basic challenge of any book is you know you're going to be working on it for three or four years or more. So you want to have a subject that will keep you engaged.