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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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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
Young
Walks
Challenges
High
American
Voice
Youthful
House
Challenging
Around
Particularly
School
Walk

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Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
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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.
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...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
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People don't want other people to be people.
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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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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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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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Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.
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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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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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We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.
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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.
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...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.
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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.
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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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All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.
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Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
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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.
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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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