Gene Wolfe Quotes

The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just a...

What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.

Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.

My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don't think of anything new. Put 'em in. Make ...

How big is a man's life?" asked Ultan."I have no way of knowing, but isn't it larger than that?""You...

I had turned my mind from my survival just as a man suffering from a deadly sickness manages by a th...

If you have a machine with three or four parts, you can shake them up in a box and it's still pretty...

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

It is well, I think, for us to learn to tell evil from good; but it has its price, as everything doe...

We can think only of creatures, of things He's made. Creatures are all we know, and can be all we kn...

Just as the room of the Inquisitor in Dr. Talos's play, with its high judicial bench, lurked somewhe...

The brown book I carry says there is nothing stranger than to explore a city wholly different from a...

I was miserable before I knew I was no longer happy

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped ...

Master Palaemon's hand, dry and wrinkled as a mummy's, groped until it found mine. "Among the initia...

That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.

You believe me wise because I taught you once, but I have not been north, as you have. You have seen...

I have no way of knowing whether you, who eventually will read this record, like stories or not. If ...

And what of the dead? I own that I thought of myself, at times, almost as dead. Are they not locked ...

We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in ...

There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a nov...

People don't want other people to be people.

When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.

Time turns our lies into truths.

Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to...

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped ...

There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.

Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

And as if by magic - and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and tha...

... I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent wha...

When we are asleep, so it seems to me, we sleep surrounded by all the years. I have imagined, sleepi...

Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its...

Whatever we may say, all of us suffer from disturbed sleep at times.Some in truth hardly sleep, thou...

I have sometimes thought that the reason the trees are so quiet in the summer is that they are in a ...

Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our ...

But I was awake, sitting by the window looking down at the trailer and Mr. Zoltan's truck. I could n...

Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle science fiction.

If Thecla had symbolized love of which I felt myself undeserving, as I know now that she did, then d...

Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make sn...

It seems to me that you can almost define civilization by saying it's people who are not willing to ...

My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with in...