“Some days passed before I could rid my thoughts of Thecla of certain impressions belonging to the false Thecla who had initiated me into the anacreontic diversions and fruitions of men and women. Possibly this had an effect opposite to… — Gene Wolfe Copy Share Image
“Here is light. You will say that it is not a living entity, but you miss the point that it is more, not less. Without occupying space, it fills the universe. It nourishes everything, yet itself feeds upon destruction. We… — Gene Wolfe Copy Share Image
Some writers say they cannot write in front of a window; many say they cannot function without almost perfect quiet. A writer with only… — Gene Wolfe Copy Share Image
“Sometimes driven aground by the photon storms, by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counterclockwise, ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our silver sails, our demon-haunted sails, our hundred-league masts as fine as threads, as fine as silver needles sewing the threads of starlight, embroidering the stars on black velvet, wet with the winds of Time… — Gene Wolfe Copy Share
Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt… — Gene Wolfe Copy Share Image
“There are beings—and artifacts—against which we batter our intelligence raw, and in the end make peace with reality only by saying, “It was an apparition, a thing of beauty and horror.” Somewhere among the swirling worlds I am so soon to explore, there lives a race like and yet unlike the human. They are no taller than we. Their bodies… — Gene Wolfe Copy Share
Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin… — Gene Wolfe Copy Share Image
“The experienced feel love or desire, or both. The inexperienced are sick with a thousand feelings, most of them unformed: fearful that they may be unable to love or to inspire love; fearful of what they may do if once they allow their emotions to carry them away; fearful that they may be unable to cut the cord that binds… — Gene Wolfe Copy Share
“For those who have never attended a science fiction convention, masquerades are features of most of the larger ones. Awards are presented for best… — Gene Wolfe Copy Share Image
“He had a wild yellow beard and long, tangled hair that stood out from his head in a way that made it seem too large for his shoulders, though they were twice the width of mine. But these were not the things I noticed first. Nor, I think, the things that anyone would notice first. Before anything else, I saw… — Gene Wolfe Copy Share
“For after all, if the lives of most men are examined in detail, it will be found that they have been experts of immense stature in some unremunerated field, the strategy and theory of some sport or the practice of some craft, have had an exhaustive knowledge of old circus posters or eighteenth-century inn signs or the mathematics of comets;… — Gene Wolfe Copy Share
You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing. — Gene Wolfe Copy Share Image