Gene Wolfe: Trending quotes

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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