Quotes from Tad Williams

It's always difficult when people compare me unfavorably with other contemporary writers. It's much easier when they use examples from earlier eras of fiction. Because then I can say, Well, I may not be talented, but at least I'm not DEAD.

Fear goes where it is invited.

What, you don't have a sofa gun? I thought everyone did.

Music really did mean something to him, he realized, and it always had. It called to him, although there were no words to describe what it promised. It was like a secret language he never forgot how to speak, a hometown he could always return to when he tired of what life was throwing at him.

Never make your home in a place," the old man had said, too lazy in the spring warmth to do more than wag a finger. "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.

Sometimes people need reasons for things, even when there are no reasons. That's what makes people believe in conspiracies or religions - if there is any difference. The world is just too complicated, so they need simple explanations.

So that's what--one yes, one not sure, and one I had had a dream about a bug.

Why were men so caught up with their honor, their solemn word, their promises? Half the time the promises were never asked of them in the first place. And yet the wars that were fought over such things, the hearts broken and the lands ruined..!

Dear Diary Went out shopping today. Picked up half a dozen sheep, two pigs, and a princess. The sheep are rather depressingly thin, the pigs and princess only slightly less so. Dear Diary Went out shopping today. Picked up half a dozen sheep, two pigs, and a princess. The sheep are rather depressingly thin, the pigs and princess only slightly less so.

You see, that is the secret of history, little Briony—who tells the last story.

It was only after they had left the bridge and its gaurdian far behind that Theo realized he had left Tansy's telephone-brooch in the pocket of his jacket. He had no plans to go back for it, of course: as far as Theo was concerned, that piece of two-legged ugliness was welcome to blow out Tansy's long-distance bill or download a ton of troll-porn and charge it to the Daisy commune. Betray me, huh? Taste the Revenge of Vilmos!

A man whose wisdom is true does not sit in waiting for the world to come at him piece by piece for proving its existence!

Do you listen to the wolves, Seoman?" Jiriki asked. "It's hard n-not to." "They sing such fierce songs." The Sitha shook his head. "They are like your mortal kind. They sing of where they have been, and what they have seen and scented. They tell each other where the elk are running, and who has taken whom to mate, but mostly they are merely crying 'I am! Here I am!'

Piercing My Hearte there is A Golden Dagger; That is God Piercing God's Hearte there is a Golden Needle; That is me

What's the light of Heaven look like on earth? Like sunlight streaming through clouds in the tackiest garage sale painting you ever saw. Really, it's so beautiful it's embarrassing. No subtlety whatsoever.

But remember this lesson, Simon, one fit for kings... or the sons of kings. Nothing is without cost. There is a price to all power, and it is not always obvious.

Every time you open your mouth," Clarence said, "you just seem older and weirder.

Thank you for your news, Princess. It is none of it happy, but only a fool desires cheerful ignorance and I try not to be a fool. That is my heaviest burden.

How can you care for a rough man like me?' he asked me. 'How can you love a man who can bring you no lands but the farm a soldier's pension can buy? Who can give your children no title of nobility?' Because love does not do sums, I should have told him. Love makes choices, and then gives its all. Had he seen himself as I first saw him though, he could have had no questions.

When you were old, did your memories crowd out your other thoughts? Or did you lose them—your childhood, your hated enemies, your friends?

He was a figurehead - an aging CEO of his own family who only showed up for the board meetings and wondered how so much got done without him.

It was frighteningly close to what he believed of his father at the worst moments - that he really was the kind of man who would send a letter signed Sincerely, Cpl. Peter Vilmos to someone he'd seen naked.

He turned up the car radio and punched buttons until he found something loud and thumpingly exultant, some piece of jolly stupidity from AC/DC.

A part of me, of course, was reminding myself over and over and over again that I should never have tried to lie to the higher angels of the Ephorate. Hubris, the Greeks called that. "A dumbshit move," might be a more contemporary way of putting it.