Top 53 Quotes & Sayings by Tad Williams

We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.

Unless technology itself is drastically repressed, the idea of the dystopian monoculture like Orwell's 1984 gets harder to believe. But the danger of a solipsistic society will grow, of a disconnected society of mirror-watchers and navel-gazers.

I've always been partial to werewolves, perhaps because there's a desperation to their plight that resonates.

A well-aimed spear is worth three.

For me, any book I'm writing is also a chance to get in and research and read and learn things that I maybe only knew a little bit about before.

People may get tired of hearing from me, but I don't think I'll ever run out of things that I want to write about.

I am a sandwich man. Somewhere early in life, my epigenetic switches got flicked to 'likes sandwiches,' and that's where they still are. I suspect it's at least in part because they're easy to eat while reading.

Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it - memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.

Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.

One of the fascinating things about researching Heaven and Hell is, of course, the fact that there are so few descriptions of Heaven, because most people can't really explain what it would be like beyond a couple of sentences, whereas Hell is quite often personal.

My parents were perfectly open-minded about everything. They never tried to convince us of what was true or what wasn't true in their minds. We were just presented with the information that was around and pretty much allowed - though, I mean, we knew how they felt. We knew they didn't go to church. So obviously that had an effect.

If you're writing fantasy or science fiction, it's really hard to do if you don't know a lot, at least in a basic way, about how the real world works.

Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build--but what happens when in all the world there are termite hills left but no bush?

Weak dogs become bones for other, stronger dogs.

Never trust people that like to call things by initials, that's my philosophy.

People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then?

Though talent is wonderful, dance is 80% work and 20% talent.

She had to find her own story, and she could make it whatever shape she thought best.

If the bears don't get you, it's home.

Tangaloor, fire-bright Flame-foot, farthest walker Your hunter speaks In need he walks In need, but never in fear.

...Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce.

After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?

Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me.

I must make a choice every time I speak a sentence in English. I try to choose the happier way of saying things, so that my own words will not weigh me down like stones.

When it falls on your head, then you are knowing it is a rock.

Wicked Tribe, Rooling Tribe! is the mejor hacker tribe. Too small, too fast, too scientific!

He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder.

He had once thought it was strange to have a friend you'd never met. Now it was even stranger, losing a friend you'd never really had

The man who lives beside the water hole does not dream of thirst.

You show me what someone listens to, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about his soul. (For instance, a bunch of Nickelback albums would have indicated he never had a soul in the first place.)

You have to go down before you can come out — that’s how these things always work.

As for monkeys, I would have five, and they would be named: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, Do Pretty Much Whatever The Hell You Want, and Expensive Attorney.

I mean, you could lie here day after day, if you wanted to, and think about nothing but waterbugs. Not chase waterbugs, mind you, just think about them. You could spend your whole day, every day, just wondering and pondering about waterbugs, and talking to others about waterbugs . . . and before you realized it, you'd be old. One day you'd realize that you'd never actually seen a waterbug . . . but by then you wouldn't want to, because it would spoil all your beautiful ideas.

If God is all-powerful, then the Devil must be nothing more than a darkness in the mind of God. But if the Devil is something real and separate, than perfection is impossible, and there can be no God... except for the aspirations of fallen angels.

Learn a lot about the world and finish things, even if it is just a short story. Finish it before you start something else. Finish it before you start rewriting it. That's really important. It's to find out if you're going to be a writer or not, because that's one of the most important lessons. Most, maybe 90% of people, will start writing and never finish what they started. If you want to be a writer that's the hardest and most important lesson: Finish it. Then go back to fix it.

Confident. Cocky. Lazy. Dead.

We are none of us promised anything but the last breath we take.

The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it.

Dying men think of funny things-and that's what we all are here, aren't we? Dying men.

So we face our final hours...and all that was once certain has become uncertain. Except for defeat. That, as always, is the end of all our stories.

Our lives aren't even about doing real things most of the time. We think and talk about people we've never met, pretend to visit places we've never actually been to, discuss things that are just names as though they were as real as rocks or animals or something. Information Age - Hell it's the Imagination Age. We're living in our own minds. No, she decided as the plane began its steep descent, really we're living in other people's minds.

When your teeth are gone, learn to like mush.

Sleep. To lie down and shut out the noise, the fear, the unceasing misery.

THE NAME OF THE WIND has everything fantasy readers like, magic and mysteries and ancient evil, but it's also humorous and terrifying and completely believable. As with all the very best books in our field, it's not the fantasy trappings (wonderful as they are) that make this novel so good, but what the author has to say about true, common things, about ambition and failure, art, love, and loss.

Honor is the only really good disguise for an occasional act of dishonor.

Ah? A small aversion to menial labor?" The doctor cocked an eyebrow. "Understandable, but misplaced. One should treasure those hum-drum tasks that keep the body occupied but leave the mind and heart unfettered.

Remember that each light between sunrise and sunset is worth dying for at least once.

Every man is the hero of his own song.

You are only a prisoner when you surrender.

The world was all mud and wire. The war in the heavens was only a faint imitation of the horror men had learned to make.

Has everyone gone mad?” “Everyone was mad already, my lady,” Cadrach said with a strange, sorrowful smile. “It is merely that the times have brought it out in them.

Every time we tell a lie, the thing we fear grows stronger.

Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess. Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their consciences with the gift of survival.