Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Gene Wolfe

Image
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
Image
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
Image
That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
Gene Wolfe
Image
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
Image
...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me
Gene Wolfe
Image
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
Image
Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
Gene Wolfe
Image
When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
Gene Wolfe
Image
Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.
Gene Wolfe
Image
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
Image
Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.
Gene Wolfe
Image
People don't want other people to be people.
Gene Wolfe
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
Gene Wolfe
Image
God is the nest we build together.
Gene Wolfe