Gene Wolfe Quotes
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Woody Allen once said: "You know there must be intelligent life in space. The question is do they have good Chinese restaurants and do they deliver?" Which is really a joke, but it is also a very profound remark. When you say do they have good Chinese restaurants, what you're really saying is, "How much are they like us?" And when you say, "Do they deliver?" you're saying, "Can they get here?" Both of which are profound questions. And at the present, we have no answers.
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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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Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.
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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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Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.
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Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
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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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Some writers say they cannot write in front of a window; many say they cannot function without almost perfect quiet. A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open truck on the Interstate.
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He's not rewarding us by talking to us. He's talking to us because He has something to say to us directly, as opposed to the things He says to all humanity.
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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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Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.
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That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
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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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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.
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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.
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That was when I found out that the best way in the world to make yourself feel better when you have hit bottom is to try to get somebody else to feel better. There are certain things in life that are truly worth knowing, and that is one of the big ones.
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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.
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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?
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You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer cared for the taste of the pale wind, no for love or lust, nor to make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the rain forests al the bottom of time--though in fact, so my uncle told me, those things brought them
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No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death - every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.
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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.
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My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.
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Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.
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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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Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?
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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.
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People don't want other people to be people.
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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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Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.
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