Gene Wolfe: Trending quotes

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Gene Wolfe: 204 quotes4 likes

“If you rob someone who would help you if you needed help you only rob yourself. […] Do you imagine you can be cruel without teaching others to be cruel to you?”

Volume 3, Ch. 17
Fiction, The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001)

“We're going to fight to the end. But it's better if you fight to somebody else's end.”

Volume 2, Ch. 2
Fiction, The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001)

“There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.”

Source: Shadow & Claw

“My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.”

“All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.”

“People don't want other people to be people.”

Source: Shadow & Claw

“Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.”

Source: Shadow & Claw

“What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.”

Source: The Wizard

“That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.”

Gene Wolfe The Claw of the Conciliator

Source: The Claw of the Conciliator

“You seem to think that the only genuine existence evil can have is conscious existence - that no one is evil unless he admits it to himself. I disagree.”

“When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.”

Source: Shadow & Claw

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.”

Source: Shadow & Claw

“There's a certain kind of lonely man who rejects love, because he believes that anyone who offers it wouldn't be a lover worth having.”

Gene Wolfe book There Are Doors

Source: There Are Doors

“You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.”

“Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.”

Gene Wolfe book The Urth of the New Sun

Source: The Urth of the New Sun

“The only actors who can really do justice to their parts are the ones who don't know what they are.”

"Kevin Malone", New Terrors (1980), ed. Ramsey Campbell, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Endangered Species (1989), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction

“He was proud, like all lonely men. Lonely men must be proud or die.”

Gene Wolfe book Starwater Strains

"The Arimaspin Legacy" (1987), first appeared as a Winter Solstice chapbook from Cheap Street, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Starwater Strains (2005)
Fiction

“Perhaps I need to begin before I can think clearly about the task. The chief thing is to begin, after all—after which the chief thing is to finish.”

Volume 1: On Blue's Waters (1999), Ch. 1
Fiction, The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001)

“The true dawn of adulthood, of intellectual maturity, if you like, is the realization that adults are all fools.”

"The Pirates of Florida and Other Impossibilities", speech at the Conference on the Fantastic (1991), as published in Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

“What little I have learned in the course of a long life, regarding the gods, I have tried to forget.”

Volume 3, Ch. 4
Fiction, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996)