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Year followed struggling year for me, and all that time I read - I suppose few have ever read so. I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure.

Gene Wolfe

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Gene Wolfe
Age: 87 †
Born: 1931
Born: May 7
Died: 2019
Died: April 14
Editor
Mechanical Engineer
Military Engineer
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Gene Rodman Wolfe
Years
Pleasure
Narrowed
Time
Year
Struggling
People
Reading
Followed
Read
Suppose
Found
Enjoyed
Young
Began
Ever
Struggle
Book
Books

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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
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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.
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A youthful American voice isn't particularly challenging - I've been a young American, and they're all around me. I can walk from my house to Barrington High School.
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Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story's ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.
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Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
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What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
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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.
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I don't think anyone is more intrinsically holy. People experience God in many ways and it seems to me that God does what the rest of us do: He chooses the means that best gets His message across.
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All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
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A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what is commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice, and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.
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I get a lot of people complaining about my ambiguity, often in cases which there is nothing ambigous at all. As far as I can see, people read it when they were half stoned and listening to the TV. Then they come back and say gee, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in a story.
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A hundred wise men have said in various ways that love transcends the power of death, and millions of fools have supposed that they meant nothing by it. At this late hour in my life I have learned what they meant. They meant that love transcends death. They are correct.
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Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
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People don't want other people to be people.
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Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.
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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
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My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences just the same, you need to understand that many of the writers we have now couldn't load a revolver.
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I could speculate, but it would be just speculation and the kind of thing that you would get in with a science fiction story. And if I was doing a science fiction story then I would come up with what can go wrong with this system.
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All the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive.
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We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.
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