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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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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
Change
Writing
Destination
Mind
Ending
Always
Unless
Start
Story
Wish
Stories

More quotes by 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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All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
Gene Wolfe
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Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
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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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
Gene Wolfe
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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
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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...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
Gene Wolfe
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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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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
Gene Wolfe
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Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
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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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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There is no limit to stupidity. - Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.
Gene Wolfe
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We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.
Gene Wolfe
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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.
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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That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
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