Gene Wolfe
American science fiction and fantasy writer.
Everyone who is grieved at anything, or discontented, is like a pig for sacrifice, kicking and squealing. Like a dove for sacrifice is he who laments in silence. Our one distinction is that it is given to us to consent, if we will, to the necessity imposed upon us.
Almost any interesting work of art comes close to saying the opposite of what it really says.
A trooper fights for honor ... or from loyalty. Or for loot sometimes. But he waits for pay. He will not wait without it, because when there is no fighting there is no honor to win, no flag to die for, no loot to gain.
Paradoxes explain everything. Since they do, they cannot be explained.
Just as mainstream literature shows us how our contemporaries view the present, and historical fiction shows us how they view the past (not, of course, what the present or the past were actually like), so speculative fiction shows us how they view the future. I happen to believe that my contemporaries' view of the past is not very important; but their view of the present is quite definitely important, and their view of the future is vital.
Any representation of a god is ultimately a lie, Silk explained. It may be a convenient lie, and it may even be a reverent one; but it's ultimately false. ... Neither image would be more nearly true than the other, or more true than any other—merely more appropriate.
You have need of learning, children, in order that the whorl will someday have need of you.
There is more to be learned from any good teacher than the subject taught.
Reading Gene Wolfe is dangerous work. It's a knife-throwing act, and like all good knife-throwing acts, you may lose fingers, toes, earlobes or eyes in the process. Gene doesn't mind. Gene is throwing the knives.
This, then, is the new illiteracy, the illiteracy of those who can read but don't. [...] This new illiteracy is more pernicious than the old, because unlike the old illiteracy it does not debar its victims from power and influence, although like the old illiteracy it disqualifies them for it. Those long-dead men and women who learned to read so that they might read the Bible and John Bunyan would tell us that pride is the greatest of all sins, the father of sin. And the victims of the new illiteracy are proud of it. If you don't believe me, talk to them and see with what pride they trumpet their utter ignorance of any book you care to name.
Every theory is true in some discipline.
The beauty of this is that it carries its own confirmation.
We're going to fight to the end. But it's better if you fight to somebody else's end.
You have a walking stick. Suppose it could walk by itself, and that it chose to walk away from you. [...] It would no longer be a walking stick at all, only a stick that walked.
Time passed, slipping through the waist of the universe's great hourglass like the eroded soil of this continent slipping down her rivers to the seas.
The same critics who spend hundreds of pages discussing various peculiarities of the author's supposed nature often devote none to that much more significant person, the reader for whom he wrote. [...] It is a failure that disqualifies a great deal of head-scratching and hypothesizing. It amounts to saying that the letter is more important than its recipient, the signal more important than the changing image created from it, the bait more important than the fish.
It is well not to spend one's symbols improvidently.
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.
When a tree is very old, yet still lives, sometimes the limbs are strangely twisted.
When neither our fellows nor our gods spoil our plans, we spoil them ourselves.
We can dive to the bottom of the sea and some say NASA will fly us to the stars, and I have known men to plunge into the past—or the future—and drown. But there's one place where we can't go. We can't go where we are already. We can't go home, because our minds, and our hearts, and our immortal souls are already there there.