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

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
Hardly
Matters
Doe
Matter
Men

More quotes by Gene Wolfe

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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.
Gene Wolfe
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Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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People don't want other people to be people.
Gene Wolfe
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We think that we know a man or a woman, when so much of what we know is actually that man's or that woman's situation, his or her place on the board of life. Move the pawn to the last row and see her rise in armor, sword in hand.
Gene Wolfe
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All time exists. That is the truth.... If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind?
Gene Wolfe
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God is the nest we build together.
Gene Wolfe
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Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
Gene Wolfe
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All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
Gene Wolfe
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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
Gene Wolfe
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Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
Gene Wolfe