Gene Wolfe
American science fiction and fantasy writer.
There is no human quality more attractive than the courage of the weak.
The true dawn of adulthood, of intellectual maturity, if you like, is the realization that adults are all fools.
The jokes of the gods are long in the telling.
As you intend to live hereafter, it is in your power to live here.
Here in two flat sentences are the best things I can say about our field on American television: Dr. Who is sometimes aired. Sometimes Battlestar Galactica is not.
We may be damned at last, by God or our consciences; and though I've met a good many people who profess to credit no God, I've never met one who believed he had no conscience—this though he could no more produce it for my inspection than I could point out the God he demanded to see.
No man has a home unless he is master of a place where he must please no one—a place where he can go and lock the door behind him.
I have never in my whole life had a fight with a smart person or even seen anybody else have one either. That is because then the fight starts the smart people are not there anymore. They have gone off someplace else, and when it is over they come back and tell you how much they did in the fight, only it is all lies.
We don't harm the gods when we mingle their names with our curses and obscenities. We harm ourselves. I said that I didn't regard most gods as holy, but they don't have to be for our malice and mockery to recoil upon ourselves.
It will come as no surprise to those of you in the book trade when I say that although books do not cause cancer, books in general do not sell as well as cigarettes.
An exaggerated and solemn respect always indicates a loss of faith.
The gods smile on us, my son, or so it is written. It's a wonder they don't laugh aloud.
Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.
Men build scales, but the gods blow upon the lighter pan.
The slight criticism of evolution I offer should not be taken as evidence that I do not believe in evolution; I do. Let's not blame God for everything. I also believe in Lamarckism, as it was put forward by Lamarck. (The Lamarckism presented in standard textbooks is actually Lysenkoism, a straw man set up by the opponents of Lamarckism, palpably false and easily disproved.) There is no paradox in that: Lamarckism and Darwinism are not mutually exclusive, except politically.
There are people who love birds so much they free them. There are others who love them so much they cage them.
Adolescents are simply those people who haven't as yet chosen between childhood and adulthood. For as long as anyone tries to hold on to the advantages of childhood—the freedom from responsibility, principally—while seeking to lay claim to the best parts of adulthood, such as independence, he is an adolescent. [...] Eventually most people choose to be adults, or are forced into it. A very few retreat into childhood and never leave it again. A large number remain adolescents for life.
In the marketplace he told of honor, and how it is a higher law than any law.
At the crossroads he talked of freedom, the freedom of the wind and clouds, and freedom that loves all things and is without guilt.
Beside the city gates he told stories of the forgotten cities that were and of the forgotten cities that might be, if only men would forget them.
"Prince of parable, I desire to see those gardens of lasting delight which Allah—the Creator! the Ever Beneficent!—reserves for the faithful. How am I to do so if I tell lies?"
"By lying to Allah, I suppose."
What little I have learned in the course of a long life, regarding the gods, I have tried to forget.