Will Shetterly Quotes

Moving around is good for creativity: the next line of dialogue that you desperately need may well be waiting in the back of the refrigerator or half a mile along your favorite walk.

There are no rules in writing. There are useful principles. Throw them away when they're not useful. But always know what you're throwing away.

It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.

Politics is a dirty business, but if you do not do politics, politics will be done to you.

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

The great thing about revision is that it's your opportunity to fake being brilliant.

It's always good to hear that people you like are happy.

Unless you're writing for a humorous effect, elves or space aliens and all creatures who aren't human should at least be as strange as, oh, the French.

Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.

They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over.

For twelve school years, every morning, she had turned left out the front door to get to work. Now the taxi turned right, spiriting her off in the opposite direction.

There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians.

West Virgina never left Katherine's heart, but Virginia was her destiny.

Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status--none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions.

Expertise in a subfield was the key to a successful career as an engineer, and expertise was becoming a necessity for the mathematicians and computers as well.