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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
Start
Story
Wish
Stories
Change
Writing
Destination
Mind
Ending
Always
Unless
More quotes by Gene Wolfe
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.
Gene Wolfe
Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
Gene Wolfe
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
All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
Gene Wolfe
There is no limit to stupidity. - Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.
Gene Wolfe
What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.
Gene Wolfe
Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
Gene Wolfe
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
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
...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
Gene Wolfe
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
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.
Gene Wolfe
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
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
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
People don't want other people to be people.
Gene Wolfe
Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.
Gene Wolfe
God is the nest we build together.
Gene Wolfe
Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
Gene Wolfe
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.
Gene Wolfe
